The Greens Are Dead. Long Live the Greens!

There is no mitigating circumstance: the Greens lost a third of their seats in last week’s European Parliament elections.

In recent years, the European Union has become the world’s most ambitious frontier in the fight against climate change. She did this through major policy changes, such as setting high goals to reduce emissions, preparing for the retirement of combustion engines, pushing for nature restoration and limiting the effects of agriculture on the environment. Green parties in the 27 EU member states have successfully driven that agenda.

But in recent years, something has clearly snapped among a large section of European voters.

European voters are concerned about the war in Ukraine and its consequences for defense and the economy. A cost-of-living crisis fueled by the coronavirus pandemic continues to grip key members of the European Union. Reducing immigration has become a concern among voters. With this new set of priorities, the Greens’ appeal seems to have faded – or worse, they feel as if they are out of touch with each other.

“Europe has really done a lot on climate action,” Bas Eickhout, a prominent Green politician from the Netherlands who is vice-chair of the European Greens, said in an interview. “But especially after the war in Ukraine and the inflation that has caused the cost of living crisis, I think there are now a lot of people who are worried and asking, ‘Okay, can we afford this?’”

Post-mortem

There are several explanations for the Greens’ poor election results.

Centrist parties nibbled away at the Greens’ support by incorporating much of their agenda into their own policies. Yet the Greens’ own identity has failed to develop sufficiently. As a result, the Greens appear to be narrowly focused on an issue – climate – that has fallen down the voters’ list of priorities.

But there is also a broader trend going on that is not in favor of the European Greens. Opposition to climate change policies as part of broader culture wars has gained momentum.

In many places, the nationalist agendas of far-right parties have been supplemented by populist appeals to economically stressed citizens. The right grew among voters by specifically targeting the Greens and portraying them as unfit to protect poorer working people in rapidly changing societies.

For many voters, the Green parties failed to demonstrate that their proposals were not just expensive, anti-growth measures that would hit the poorest most. And some see them as elitist urbanites who ignore the costs of transitioning to a less climate-damaging way of life.

Mr Eickhout said the attack on his party had taken hold. “They are portraying this transition as a very elitist transition, that it is only for the ‘Tesla people,’” he said. “And I can tell you, Tesla no longer has a good image.”

Then there are Europe’s farmers, who have protested fiercely against green policies over the past two years, particularly those that seek to limit the use of chemicals in agriculture and introduce conservation measures that would eat away at farmland. The protests have spooked moderate voters and politicians.

In Europe, Green parties have performed particularly poorly in the polls in countries where they are part of the governing coalition, particularly in Germany.

The huge youth movement that saw the Greens win one in five votes in Germany five years ago has been punctured by becoming part of the governing coalition. “The party cannot satisfy the younger progressive voters they want to welcome into its ranks and at the same time please the moderate voters who are wealthier,” said Sudha David-Wilp, regional director at the German Marshall Fund’s Berlin office.

Because Germany is the most populous country in the European Union, and thus has the most seats in the 720-seat assembly of the European Parliament, the Greens’ poor performance had wide resonance there.

Green shoots

The picture for the Greens is not bad everywhere. Green parties performed very well in Scandinavian countries such as Denmark, Finland and Sweden, possibly due to higher prosperity and longer debates on climate change.

And they have made surprising progress in Eastern and Southern Europe, including Italy and Spain, places that have traditionally had weak Green parties and in some cases have never even elected Green MEPs to the European Parliament.

Perhaps the most complex political picture for GroenLinks emerged in the Netherlands, a country with a particularly strong climate movement, a uniquely organized and strong farmers’ movement and an extremely successful far-right movement that won the national elections at the end of last year.

There, the Greens formally participated in the elections together with the social democratic party Labor and won the elections, relegating the far-right party to second place.

For the Greens, this kind of successful cooperation could be a model for coalitions in upcoming local and national elections elsewhere in the European Union, Mr Eickhout said.

“It is absolutely crucial that the Green Party has broader credibility, not just on climate,” he said, adding that working with social democratic parties could help create an attractive progressive alternative to conservatives and the far right, while remaining loyal to the climate roots of the Greens.

Who pays?

The poor performance for the Greens has led to a chorus of lamentations that the European Union’s Green Deal – famously the set of policies the bloc has adopted to combat climate change and limit its own contribution to it – is dead is.

According to experts, these concerns are unrealistic: many of the policies that would enable an ambitious CO2 reduction target are already enshrined in law.

But delays and policy dilution as a result of the loss of green momentum are very real risks, warns Simone Tagliapietra, an expert on EU climate policy at Bruegel, a major Brussels-based think tank.

And ending funding for Green Deal policies could also undermine their effectiveness. To prevent that, he added, the European Union should push for a joint budget to invest in the green transition and protect the poorest from economic consequences.

“The radical transformation of the Green Deal raises difficult questions about who will pay the costs,” Tagliapietra said. “If those costs end up falling disproportionately on ordinary workers — let alone the poorest and most vulnerable communities — the transformation will exacerbate inequality and become socially and politically unfeasible,” he added. “That is not an option.”

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin.