That was the short answer, now for the long one...
The early '80s saw a lot of protests against the stationing of more nukes over here in Europe (it's funny - back then the Left blamed it on Reagan though the accords were pushed through by Carter, after the collapse of the Soviet Union the Right agreed too - and now it's the accepted way of thinking of the era) which, in the public memory are linked to the more important protests against nuclear dumps and new nuclear plants of the same period, largely because the same people were involved. The rise of the German Greens, Schröder's coalition partner, is definitely tied up with those events. (This doesn't sound right - correct my English, please.
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Schröder was the chairman of the Jusos, the SPD's youth organization, at the time, and was one of the earliest propagators of Red-Green coalitions within the SPD. He also ram against Nuclearphile State PM Ernst Albrecht (CDU) twice in Lower Saxony (losing in 86, winning in 90), and formed the second Red-Green coalition on a state level after that. (The first had been here in Hessen.) I guess that with a bit of selective memory, a bit of guileful misrepresentation, you could easily turn that into an Anti-American record.
And in 2002, the issue of a possible Iraq war suddenly arose in the middle of the Election campaign, and it certainly helped Schröder win reelection, though the floods on the Elbe were more important by far.
As to your personal experiences: It's not as if we spend all our lives talking about Bush. I can think of thousands of nicer topics than that guy. The issue is bound to crop up from time to time, and you'll find few people who can see anything positive in Bush. I guess you could have got some kind of conversation on the topic going by mentioning that you dislike Bush. But then that would have been a lie...
Germany may be a Federal Republic to the CIA because our states are older than our country (like some of yours) and all have different constitutions (like all of yours) - there's lots of other countries with some sort of "states", but most of them might be described as fake federacies - ie the central government set up the states.
Oh, and to set that point from your post before straight: Last time I checked there were more than half a dozen parties in the Egyptian parliament. It's just that one of them always wins...
