Their most visible member, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, said a new coalition government including the Greens was "improbable" and said he believed he would therefore no longer play a major role in politics.

The Greens are being eyed as the third partner in a coalition with Angela Merkel's conservatives and the pro-business Free Democrats, who had wanted to govern together but with a combined 45 percent fell short of a ruling majority.

The pro-environment Greens - who polled 8.1 percent in Sunday's vote - could therefore tip the scales and grant Merkel her wish of becoming Germany's first female chancellor.

The tie-up - known here as a "Jamaica coalition" because the parties' colours match the black, yellow and green of its flag - is seen as an alternative to a potentially fraught "grand coalition" between Merkel's party and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats.

The Greens have argued however that the policy gap between them and the liberals and conservatives is too wide to bridge.

"We are not here as a facilitator to help the free market radicals get into government through the backdoor," the co-president of the Greens, Reinhard Buetikofer, told Tuesday's Berliner Zeitung daily.

The Greens have for the past seven years ruled in a coalition with the Social Democrats in their first taste of power on a national level.

They are believed to have helped shape Schroeder's energy, environment and foreign policies, notably Germany's support for Turkey's bid to join the European Union.

Merkel opposes full EU membership for Turkey, and in her campaign promised to rewrite several aspects of energy policy on which the Schroeder government prides itself, including giving a new lease of life to nuclear power.

"I think it is unlikely that we could cross these hurdles," Environment Minister Juergen Trittin, a Green, told ARD television.

Trittin said the Greens would talk to the other parties but their stance on Turkey, nuclear power, renewable energy and workers' rights were "not negotiable." "We put our principles before power," said Katrin Goering-Eckhart, the Greens' parliamentary party leader.

But environmental groups warned on Tuesday that the Greens were deluding themselves if they thought they could make their policies prevail in a conservative-led government.

"I don't think the Greens will have much of an influence," the leader of Greenpeace's Berlin branch, Stefan Krug, told AFP.

"From an environmental point of view we can expect exactly nothing from a Jamaica," he added.

Not only environmentalists but Green voters have become nervous that the party was preparing to compromise behind the scenes, the Berliner Zeitung said.

The Greens have said they were ready to talk to all other parties and some members are arguing for a compromise as a way out of the chaos wreaked by Sunday's election after the two main parties finished less than a percentage point apart.

"It will not be the Greens' fault if this country cannot find a government," said the party's finance expert Christine Scheel.

The Greens are also seen as a potential partner in a coalition between the Social Democrats and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) - called a "traffic light" in Germany because the parties' colours are red, yellow and green.

But that would mean persuading the FDP to desert Merkel and help Schroeder stay in power - a possibility ruled out by its leader Guido Westerwelle.

And once again it would prove hard to get the Greens and the liberals to get along.

While the Greens disagree with the conservatives they have even less in common with the FDP, Trittin said, calling the liberals' economic policies "the exact opposite of ours."

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