Approximately 200,000 people marched Saturday in four German cities protesting against nuclear power.

"Switch them off," protesters shouted in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich just as news reports were revealing that radioactivity in the seawater near the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan was rising.

There will be more demonstrations around Easter, the organizers said, vowing to keep up the pressure on the government to shut down all 17 nuclear reactors in the country.

Germans have been skeptical about nuclear power for quite some time.

The German Green Party was founded in 1980 to give the anti-war and anti-nuclear grassroots movements a political voice.

On Sunday, the Greens rose to impressive election results in two German states, mainly thanks to their strong anti-nuclear profile, observers say.

In Rhineland-Palatinate, the Greens could become the junior coalition partner in a government with the Social Democrats.

In Baden-Wuerttemberg, home to four reactors, the Green Party doubled its result and is expected to lead the new government. It's the first time German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives have to relinquish power in this rich and populous state since 1953.

Merkel admitted Monday that the defeat was linked to her party's energy policy, which has appeared somewhat chaotic.

In 2001, the Social Democrat/Greens government agreed to phase out nuclear power by 2021.

Despite severe public opposition, Merkel late last year decided to scrap the phase out and extend the running times of the German reactors by an average of 12 years. Nuclear power, the government argued at the time, is stable, cheap and carbon dioxide-free.

At the height of the Japanese nuclear crisis, Merkel did another U-turn when she decided to shut Germany's seven oldest reactors down for at least three months, adding that they may not be restarted. She said her experts were looking into strategies how to phase out nuclear power much quicker than anticipated.

It's already becoming clear that the energy companies in Germany won't go down without a fight.

A spokeswoman from utility RWE over the weekend told the Rheinische Post newspaper that the company would investigate taking legal action against any government-ordered reactor closures. Eon, Germany's largest utility, and EnBW are also said to be evaluating suing Berlin. For any future German government, phasing out nuclear could become difficult and costly.

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