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Minister of Consumer Protection, Food, and Agriculture, Renate Künast from the Green Party, was determined to change the agricultural priorities. Heavy media coverage of the BSE events reduced information asymmetries and information gathering costs for the public and many more Germans became aware of the realities of industrialized agriculture, even if the production units themselves were romanticized family farms. Mrs Künast had few farmers among of her own constituency but had much to lose in the next elections if she failed to address 15 issues of food safety and production methods . This meant that she and her party—a veto- weilding component of Schröder’s domestic coalition, to use Tsebelis’s (2002) term from the theory chapter—were in favour of the CAP reform along the lines of the Commission’s (2002) proposal. Furthermore, as a special interest group, German farmers were losing their grip on domestic politics (Hennis 2005, 169). Its umbrella lobbying organization, Deutscher Bauernverband 16 (DBV), had traditionally enjoyed a close relationship with the federal government . Now, however, it was debilitated by internal conflicts (in which the impact of the 1992 and 1999 CAP reforms on the distribution of rents played significant role) and had come into sharp conflict with other corporatist actors in federal politics. In addition, “the corporatist model had not automatically expanded to East Germany. In fact, this is also shown by the diminished electoral support of farmers for the CEU since reunification, in spite of the increase in actual number of farmers” (Hennis 2005, 158). Despite having acted as a catalysing element in the previous reforms, the disunity of the German agricultural community meant that DBV was now 17 more reliant on their French counterpart FNSEA than ever before to do the lobbying on its 15 Greens preferred less intensive ways of producing food such as organic products (Perraud (2004) in Garzon (2006, 100)) 16 Hennis points out that while historically only some 7% of German farmers voted for the SPD, the “rather cooperative way of policymaking“ that caracterized the German political system meant that farmers had enjoyed generous rents even when their highly favour party, the CDU, was not in power. (Hennis 2005, 147‐8) 47