Daniel Cohn-Bendit

He was born in Montauban, France, on 4 April 1945. His father, Erich Cohn-Bendit, was a Trotskyist lawyer for the Red Aid, and the couple had fled the Nazis to Paris in 1933. Because his parents had lost their citizenship he was stateless for some years; in 1958 he moved to Frankfurt, attended the Odenwald School, and at fourteen chose German citizenship, partly to avoid French military service.

In autumn 1965 he began sociology at Nanterre, where he knew a small anarchist group. He defied the segregation of men and women in the student residences, and in January 1968, at the opening of a swimming pool, challenged the youth and sports minister François Missoffe over why his white paper on youth left out sexuality. When some anti-Vietnam War demonstrators were arrested on 21 March 1968, students occupied the university senate rooms the next day, and some 140 anarchist, Maoist, Situationist and Trotskyist students answered his appeal to unite in the "22 March Movement", a decentralised, anti-institutional alliance for direct action.

After Nanterre was closed on 3 May he led a sit-in at the Sorbonne that escalated into street fighting and a general strike. Before the disciplinary committee on 6 May he called himself an "anarchist Marxist": Marx's analysis of capitalist society was right, but the organisational forms of the communist movement produced not a new society but new authoritarian rule. In a public interview with Sartre on 20 May he said society could be changed not by an organised vanguard but only by uncontrolled spontaneity. When the French government barred his return on 22 May, Paris students marched under the slogan "We are all German Jews".

In August 1968 he and his brother Gabriel wrote, in five weeks, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (Le Gauchisme, remède à la maladie sénile du communisme), whose French title turns round Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Daniel gave a vivid account of the revolt from Nanterre to the general strike; Gabriel attacked the collaboration of the state, the union leadership and the French Communist Party in restoring order, defusing revolutionary energy and handing the factories back to the capitalists. The book assailed Leninism and the unions as top-down bureaucracies whose need to manage and control was always at odds with revolutionary action. It was published by eighteen foreign houses, though its large advance drew criticism within the German SDS.

He settled in Frankfurt, where at the end of 1969 he formed a "factory project group" within the SDS; after the SDS fell apart it called itself Revolutionärer Kampf and modelled itself on Italy's Lotta Continua. There he met Joschka Fischer, with whom he founded the Karl Marx bookshop in 1970 as a collective paying equal wages, and he became a spokesman of Frankfurt's squatting struggles. From 1972 to 1974 he worked in the university's self-managed day-care centre, and in October 1976 he founded the left-alternative city magazine Pflasterstrand.

In the 1975 interview book Le Grand Bazar he recounted his part in May 1968 and the Sponti movement; reviewers noted that it lacked a political programme. The book contained passages describing sexual acts with children, which in 2001 grew into accusations of abuse. Parents and children he had looked after rejected the accusations in an open letter, and he said he had never abused children and that the text was provocative fiction, repeatedly apologising for it as "great stupidity".

Before the 1978 Hesse state election he helped form a Green electoral alliance, and the "Sponti voters' initiative" he led began to discuss co-operation with the SPD left. In December 1984 he formally joined the Hesse Greens, aiming to unseat the eco-socialists, the so-called "Fundis"; with Joschka Fischer he stood for the "Realo" wing, which made possible Hesse's first SPD–Green coalition in 1985.

In July 1989 Frankfurt's mayor Volker Hauff appointed him honorary head of the Office for Multicultural Affairs, the first of its kind in Germany, which he ran until 1997, setting up a municipal foreigners' council and opening the city administration to intercultural practice. He entered the European Parliament for the German Greens in 1994 and was re-elected in 1999 at the head of the French Greens' list. As co-chair of the Greens/European Free Alliance group from 2002 to 2014 he argued for a federal European constitution, decided by referendums, with a political European government.

In 2010 he drove the refounding of the French Greens as Europe Écologie–Les Verts, but left the party in December 2012 after it opposed the European Fiscal Compact, while remaining a member of the German Greens. He withdrew from front-line politics at the 2014 European election and became a French citizen in 2015.