{"id":8561,"date":"2019-05-31T09:45:43","date_gmt":"2019-05-31T09:45:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/?p=8561"},"modified":"2019-06-01T23:06:34","modified_gmt":"2019-06-01T23:06:34","slug":"greens-take-on-far-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/2019\/05\/greens-take-on-far-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Greens take on far right"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A green wave has flooded Europe in the 2019 European elections.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The big winners of the night were the German Greens, who took 20.5%.<\/a> of the national vote, almost doubling their 10.7% share from 2014. This best ever result is even more significant given the exceptionally high turnout in Germany of 61.4%<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The German Greens will\nnow be represented by 21 MEPs \u2013 ten more than in the last parliament.\nMeanwhile, the Social Democrats (SPD) suffered a historic defeat, losing 12 of\ntheir MEPs. The Christian Democrats (CDU\/CSU) lost five. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These staggering\npro-Green results in the European elections have firmly put environmentalism on\nthe political agenda within both Germany and Europe. The once dominant European\nParliament party groups of the centre right and the centre left have lost their\nmajority, which means the Green bloc could become kingmakers. Both sides will\nneed support from the Greens to create broad pro-EU majorities, giving the\ngroup a strengthened hand to push for real, European, ecological change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A real alternative<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In eight months of PhD\nfieldwork on the Greens in Berlin, Kiel and Stuttgart, I have some observations\nabout how the party has transformed to become the main political challenger in\nGermany \u2013 a country known best for its economy and car manufacturers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The German Greens have no\ndoubt benefited from their perceived competence on climate change and increased\nawareness of the need for proactive environmental protection. But they are also\ndeliberately repositioning themselves as a real alternative to the parties of\ngovernment. And the approach seems to be working. The party welcomed more than 10,000 new members in 2018<\/a> alone, a\nfigure that continues to rise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Greens have further\ncemented their status by taking strong positions on issues beyond the\nenvironment. They are emphatically pro-Europe, and anti-racism and the far\nright. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During my fieldwork, I\nfound that this issue has been just as important as climate change for those\njoining the party. Membership numbers started to rapidly increase, for\ninstance, as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) entered the national\nparliament. Rather than pander to the AfD\u2019s anti-immigration rhetoric, as other\npolitical parties have done, the Greens have taken a very adversarial approach\nto the newcomers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the AfD made a\nformal complaint to parliament in February 2018 about a speech by National\nGreen MP Cem \u00d6zdemir accusing the AfD of racism and censorship<\/a>,\nGreen politicians hit back. Green MEP Sven Giegold collected instances of AfD\npoliticians being racist and Islamophobic so that the party could put forward\nits own complaint to the same all-party parliamentary committee and then published them on his website<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Groundswell<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This positioning of the\nparty as an alternative happens on the streets as much as in institutions. The\nGerman Greens unapologetically mobilise within movements that oppose the AfD\nand racism, such as the \u201cEurope for All\u201d march that campaigned for a Europe\nfree from the far right. They also support groundbreaking ecological movements,\nfrom campaigns to phase out coal to the recent #FridaysForFuture<\/a> school strikes for\nclimate, inspired by environmental activist Greta Thunberg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, the CDU and\nSPD \u2013 the two traditionally catch-all parties of Germany \u2013 are perceived to\nhave taken little action on climate change during their time in a grand\ncoalition government. They appear to have been punished for this at the polls,\nwith both parties losing vote share to the Greens in the EU elections in\ncomparison with the vote shares achieved during the last German general election<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The German Greens also seem to be the only party to have\nsuccessfully undertaken reform strategies since the general election of 2017.\nParty members elected new party co-leaders Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock\nin January 2018, who appear to have stopped infighting between leftist and\nreformist party wings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, infighting\ncontinues unabated in the CDU and SPD. The CDU is plagued by those calling for\na shift to the right after Angela Merkel\u2019s tenure as chancellor comes to an\nend. And the leader of the SPD youth wing, Kevin K\u00fchnert, has made his name by\nopenly criticising his own party\u2019s role in the grand coalition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Green chancellor?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The European elections saw\nthe Greens perform overwhelmingly well in cities and in western states. The\naffluent state of Baden-W\u00fcrttemberg is run by a majority Green coalition,\nheaded by prime minister Winfried Kretschmann, and the state capital,\nStuttgart, has a Green mayor, Fritz Kuhn. Despite the controversial\nintroduction of a one-year provisional diesel ban<\/a> in Stuttgart at the start of this\nyear, the Greens managed to increase their vote share in the municipal\nelections held alongside the EU elections. The Greens are now the largest party\nin Stuttgart, ahead of the former leaders, the CDU. This increased trust of\ngreen politics in the affluent west could be seen in the party\u2019s similarly\nstrong showing in the state elections in wealthy Hesse and Bavaria last\nOctober.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, in eastern states,\nwhere economic deprivation and political dissatisfaction are much higher, the\nGreens struggle to break through in the same way. Despite coming second only to\nthe CDU overall in the European elections, the Greens have scored much lower\nvote shares in areas of Germany that used to belong to East Germany, with only\na few, metropolitan exceptions<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With some of these eastern\nstates due to have state elections later this year, this will be an interesting\ntest for the #GreenWave. Whether they prove successful or not in these regional\nvotes, this European electoral success could lead to the Greens playing a big\nrole in the next national government coalition negotiations. We could see the\nreturn of the Greens as a junior coalition partner after 16 years in\nopposition, this time with the CDU, or as the leading party in a left-coalition\nwith the SPD and The Left Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the Greens maintain their position as Germany\u2019s second party ahead of the SPD, this coalition could even mean that Germany could have a Green chancellor in the not too distant future. Not bad for a supposedly \u201cone-issue\u201d party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First published by The Conversation<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image: Dominik Butzmann, German Greens website<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further reading:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the Scottish Greens fail…, The Scotsman<\/a>, May 28<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A green wave has swept over Europe (but not in Scotland)…lessons for the ‘big’ mainstream parties? Mobilise on the streets against racists\/fascists…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":270,"featured_media":8565,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[421],"tags":[351,79,68],"class_list":["post-8561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international","tag-eu","tag-germany","tag-greens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/270"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}