Green politics has grown across the Global North. But can green parties really deliver progressive change?
Coll McCail || During this year’s UK general election campaign, the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) welcomed hundreds of leftwing activists driven out of Keir Starmer’s Labour. Socialists who had previously been inspired by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s popular programme sought refuge in the arms of a party that championed the key tenets of his project – the nationalization of utilities, a green industrial revolution and justice for the people of Palestine.
Compared with the leaders of Britain’s mainstream political parties, the Greens’ co-leader Carla Denyer offered ‘real change’ to break with the political orthodoxy – or at least stretch it. The electorate responded by awarding the Greens 6.7 per cent of the vote and three new seats, bringing the party’s parliamentary representation to a record four MPs.
But on significant issues of foreign policy, the Greens’ offer aligned with their opponents. Questioned on her party’s security policy, Denyer said that, as a member of NATO, it is ‘totally fair’ that Britain is ‘asked to contribute a fair amount toward the [NATO] defence budget’. Indeed, NATO, according to the GPEW’s manifesto, is an example of ‘international solidarity’.
The Greens’ line on Palestine may be worlds apart from Keir Starmer’s, but their criticisms of British foreign policy only extend so far, falling short of a coherent challenge to the military-industrial complex.
Leftwingers are duty-bound to consider whether green parties are a worthwhile use of our energies
This problem is not unique to Britain. Across the Irish Sea, the Greens have supported attempts to better integrate Ireland into the Western security framework by weakening the ‘triple-lock’ on neutrality and allowing US military stopovers at Shannon airport. Nor is it new. At the turn of the millennium, the German Greens supported NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the US’s catastrophic invasion of Afghanistan two years later.
Peace and nonviolence stand alongside ecology, social justice and grassroots democracy as one of the four foundational ‘pillars’ of green politics. First developed in Germany in 1979, these principles offered political expression to the social movements and political tendencies that composed the New Left of the 1960s.
But the record of green parties across the world (though they mainly exist and succeed in the Global North) shows the pillars to be rather supple. In light of this evidence, which is particularly pronounced for parties which get close to government or even enter it, leftwingers are duty-bound to consider whether green parties are a worthwhile use of their energies.
Natural home of the Left?
Far from carrying anti-systemic forces with them into power, green parties in Germany, Austria, Scotland and Ireland have jettisoned their radicalism in recent years. Scotland’s largest-ever private finance initiative was brokered by a Green government minister in March last year, in a £2 billion deal ($2.5 billion) with a private bank to restore native woodland and capture greenhouse gases.
Greens have kept rightwing parties in office in Ireland and Austria, giving support to Karl Nehammer’s inhumane immigration policy in the latter. And in Germany, the coalition government – in which the Greens hold the foreign ministry – has increased arms sales to Israel tenfold since October 2023, and violently repressed pro-Palestine protests.
But few cases better illustrate the divergence between Greens and the social movements they once sought to embody than that of Lützerath. This village in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia was destroyed in January 2023 to make way for the expansion of a nearby coal mine. Astonishingly, this decision was supported by the Green Party leadership at both a state and federal level. Hundreds of climate activists, led by Greta Thunberg, had to be forcibly removed from Lützerath before the bulldozers could move in.
In response to these criticisms Sean Currie, co-spokesperson for the Federation of European Young Greens says: ‘Green Parties necessarily compromise when they are in power,’ noting that no green Party has governed alone, and few have governed alongside a party to their left. ‘Simply being a radical party and then refusing to negotiate to build a coalition to then change policy is not particularly useful. That’s the role of social movements. The role of political parties is to try to win power and change things for the people.’
By exercising their political power, Currie argues, greens do more for leftwing politics in Europe than those to their left who shun the prospect of compromise and negotiation in favour of principle and purity. He concedes that sometimes, as in the case of Lützerath, green parties compromise too much, but he maintains that, in most European countries, ‘the greens are the natural home of the Left in 2024’.
‘Five-bedroom houses’
This is a very different conception of green parties from that imagined by their founders, who hoped to promote the politics of social movements. European capitalism, indeed, appears to have accommodated greens at minimal expense. The Green group in the European Parliament, for example, supported the Lisbon Treaty, which codified anti-trade union laws and drove down standards of workers’ rights across Europe. In Austria and Ireland, the presence of green parties in power appears to have stabilised the neoliberal settlement, temporarily shielding the centre from insurgent challengers.
For Denyer’s party in Britain, leveraging the influence of green parties across Europe to exert concessions relative to their strength is one thing, but it won’t deliver the ‘real change’ promised ahead of the general election.
In July 2022, the Australian Greens asked Anthony Albanese’s Labor government to choose ‘co-operation or confrontation’ on climate change. Days later, the Greens announced their support for a climate policy that leader Adam Bandt had once claimed would ‘cook our country by three degrees or more’.
Instead of using the balance of power they had won in the 2022 election as political leverage, the Greens ditched their principles and supported Labor’s climate bill. Besides contradicting their commitment to oppose new fossil fuel extraction, the Greens also settled for a 43 per cent cut in emissions as per Labor’s manifesto.
Tellingly, during her campaign in Britain, Denyer stated that voters were ‘finding their home’ with the Greens whether they lived in ‘high rises’ or ‘five-bedroom houses’. There’s a basic truth to this: the party – like Labour – has built up a coalition of middle and working-class voters. But even more so than with Starmer’s party, this coalition is predicated on a rejection of class politics.
The consequence is a default to class neutrality that binds green parties’ to the prevailing political orthodoxy and leaves them unable to challenge capitalism. Green parties’ electoral coalition would burst asunder before sustaining a protracted confrontation with larger parties over major political questions. Trapped within this status quo by their appeal to both workers and the wealthy, greens are naturally conflict-averse.
Entering power and propping up parties to their right serves to hide otherwise irreconcilable fault lines. The anti-institutional coalitions that greens assemble can be broad, but ultimately very shallow, as exemplified by the far-right Alternative for Germany winning seats at the German Greens’ expense in this year’s European Parliament election. The lack of a unified class interest behind their base also enables green parties to capitulate to capital – as seen in Denyer’s defence of NATO membership.
Trapped within the status quo by their appeal to both workers and the wealthy, greens are naturally conflict-averse
In his address to the UN General Assembly last September, Gustavo Petro argued that humanity faces ‘a crisis of life’. Colombia’s first progressive president saw this catastrophe evident in the mass movement of people from the South to the North, fleeing war, scarcity and climate breakdown.
But with their compromised politics, northern green parties cannot respond effectively to this ‘crisis of life’ while servicing the institutions of US hegemony. Incapable of a systemic analysis of imperialism because of their class neutrality, green parties adopt an insular and instrumental politics that cannot encompass the internationalist vision to which Petro points.
With millions on the march for peace and justice in Palestine around the world, progressives must remain resolute in their opposition to imperialism. ‘No-one is free until Palestine is free,’ protesters chant at mass demonstrations. Much of the Greens’ surge in Britain’s general election can be directly attributed to the party’s support for a ceasefire in Palestine – as, all the while, Denyer defended the very imperial infrastructure that enables the ongoing genocide.
On questions of militarism, the politics of compromise is of little use. The importance of principle is paramount.
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