Party leader Cem Ozdemir said the anti-nuclear Greens, who claimed leadership of their first state government Sunday and made huge gains in another, had the wind at their backs.

"It is obvious that voters are looking to us to play a new role," he said a day after the Greens wrested power from Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats in Baden-Wuerttemberg, where they had governed for nearly six decades.

"We want to give the voters who chose us for the first time a new electoral home."

Co-leader Claudia Roth said the success of the Greens and their likely coalition partners, the Social Democrats (SPD), was particularly promising in a state where industrial giants Porsche, Daimler and Bosch are based.

"A Green state premier in Baden-Wuerttemberg, home to the automobile and mechanical engineering industries, will show that you can make a profit with green ideas and that ecology and the economy are not at odds."

She said the Greens aimed to win representation in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania -- the last region where they have no seats -- in September.

Roth was also bullish about the party's prospects in Bremen in a poll in May and in the capital Berlin, which also votes in September and where the Greens hope to capture the helm of their second state legislature.

However analysts warned that the timing of Sunday's elections against the backdrop of the Japan nuclear crisis was a perfect launchpad for the Greens which might be difficult to replicate.

"The Greens should not think that their results reflect their true strength," said Oskar Niedermayer of Berlin's Free University, estimating that the party was probably the country's third most popular behind Merkel's conservatives and the SPD.

"Without Japan, they would not have done as well."

Political scientist Nils Diederich said that Baden-Wuerttemberg's wealth, with an economy the size of Belgium's, was also a decisive factor and noted that Berlin, one of Germany's poorest cities, may be cooler to the Greens.

"Berliners think more about jobs than the environment," he said, adding that the popular Social Democrat mayor in the capital, Klaus Wowereit, was a formidable opponent.

Founded as an anti-nuclear, ecologist outfit in 1980, the Greens gradually made inroads throughout West Germany state-by-state and served as the junior partners in an SPD-led federal government from 1998 to 2005.

During that time, they wrote legislation that would have mothballed all of Germany's nuclear reactors by around 2020.

However Merkel's centre-right government overturned that decision in 2010 -- a move that came back to haunt her in light of the accident at Japan's Fukashima nuclear plant.

Merkel attempted a quick climb-down ahead of the polls and suspended for three months the plan to extend the life of the reactors, four of which are based in Baden-Wuerttemberg.

She also temporarily shut off the country's seven oldest reactors pending a safety review.

But polls indicated that voters saw Merkel's zigzagging as an electoral ploy in a country where fears of a nuclear accident have run high since even before the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

It cost her support in the elections while boosting the Greens, who doubled their score in Baden-Wuerttemberg and tripled it in Rhineland-Palatinate, where they are expected to form a coalition with the SPD.

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