European Greens movement to take on kingmaker role

A child waits outside voting cabins with curtains depicting the European Union in Baleni, Romania. Photo / AP

European Green parties were cheering elections that vaulted them into a kingmaking position of power, as voters abandoned traditional political parties in favour of climate-focused activists in a green wave that swept several countries.

The results propelled the Greens into second place in Germany and third place in France and elsewhere, amid a surge in excitement from young voters who faulted old-school parties for ignoring their concerns about the environment and offering few alternatives for a generation beset by economic pain following the global financial crisis.

In an election for the European Parliament where far-right, anti-immigration buccaneers also gained modestly to post their best-ever result, the good showing for the Greens may have the bigger impact on policy.

The centre-left and centre-right parties that long jointly ruled the Parliament have lost their majority, meaning they will need to depend on Greens and other centrists to advance their agenda.

The far-right captured about a quarter of the seats, up from a fifth — enough to entrench their angry voices of protest and cause trouble in the legislature, but not enough to actually enact an agenda.

"This is confirmation for us that the topics we've been working on for years are the topics that matter to the public in their everyday life and for the future of their children," said Sergey Lagodinsky, a newly elected Green member of the European Parliament from Germany.

"We had times when we wondered: Is this a fringe agenda? Now we know it's not. It's the mainstream agenda."

People march during a climate protest in Brussels. Photo / AP

Many Green parties in Europe have evolved into disciplined political machines with an agenda that extends far beyond the environment.

And they have been particularly successful at capturing energy from young voters.

Fridays for Future, a global movement of students who skip school to protest climate inaction, has been active in Europe for months, inspired by a 16-year-old Swedish student, Greta Thunberg, who has become an influential activist.

"The new generation has been re-politicised," Lagodinsky said.

"We thought about these young people as people who only stare at their screens. But they can walk the streets. And that has an impact on their parents and grandparents."

In some countries, including in Germany, Greens have served in government. But they had never achieved such widespread gains until these elections. To some, the result felt like a Green ticket into the European establishment.

The party gained 2 percentage points, winning 9 per cent of the 751-seat legislature. Although the overall gain was modest — and in Europe's south and east, they made little progress — they outperformed in several of Europe's biggest and most influential countries.

"They've become mainstream. They have matured enormously. They're much more disciplined," said Heather Grabbe, the director of the Open Society European Policy Institute, a think-tank.

A girl shouts slogans as she marches with others during a climate protest in Brussels. Photo / AP

Their appeal to voters goes beyond the environment, she said, after many centre-left leaders offered the same mix of austerity-driven fixes for the 2008 economic crisis as their centre-right rivals.

"Neoliberalism has triumphed in economic policy, with both the centre-right and centre-left adopting it. And then the economic crisis came along, and the left did not benefit from that," Grabbe said. "The left did not provide alternatives."

Green issues have reverberated outward: Leaders from other parties, seeing a Green success bubbling in the opinion polls, emphasised climate issues in the campaign. "Green is not the sole property of the Green Party," Frans Timmermans, a senior Dutch politician who was the European centre-left coalition's lead candidate, said at a debate last month. He said that other political parties — notably his own — were also focusing on the environment.

That will benefit the Greens. As they sweep into Parliament, they will have to team up with others to enact their agenda, as they have already with success inside individual countries.

"In an increasing number of countries we're a real player, a real polar force now, and we want to translate that to the European level," Reinhard Bütikofer, a longtime German Green MP, told an after-election event yesterday.

The Green wave was most pronounced in Germany, where the party has long been a potent political player — even serving for seven years as the junior partner in a coalition government in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Protesters hold rallies in several European Union countries to demand tougher action against global warming. Photo / AP

But it had never enjoyed a day like Monday, when it vaulted into second place nationwide with nearly 21 per cent of the vote. The surge for the Greens was mirrored by a collapse for the Social Democrats, traditionally the dominant party on the left of German politics but perhaps now supplanted.

The result followed a string of Green successes in German state elections and reflected a surge in the polls that dates back nearly a year.

German voters told pollsters that the environment was their top concern. Exit polls in Germany showed the Greens to be the overwhelming top choice for young voters and for first-time voters.

The Greens in Germany have pushed for aggressive action to curb climate change, including an earlier-than-planned phaseout of coal power. Jürgen Falter, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Mainz, said the onus is now on mainstream parties to show they take the issue seriously.

In a reflection of just how much the Greens are steering the debate in Germany, far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Alexander Gauland declared that the party was now "our main enemy". The AfD, which denies the science behind man-made climate change, had a disappointing election, failing to match its performance in the 2017 federal polls.

France saw a humiliating loss for the centre-left but gains for the Greens. They came in third place, with 13.5 per cent of the vote. The Socialists won only 6.2 per cent. In France as elsewhere, the left seems not to have died but changed form. To the extent that a muscular leftist movement exists, it is now Green.

"The Greens represent the only project of the future," French Greens leader Yannick Jadot said on French television.

Climate change, said Liberation, "has become the principal criteria of judging political action in the EU."