Environmentalists seek more clout in Europe

Europe’s Greens stood on the sidelines of last week’s European Community summit in Madrid. But these outsiders are on the offensive. The endangered environment has become a mainstream political issue everywhere, and the Greens have finally come of age. In the elections for the European Parliament two weeks ago, the Greens gave a convincing demonstration of their growing strength by winning 39 of the 518 seats at stake, nearly double their previous representation. Green candidates won almost 11 percent of the popular vote in France, more than 6 percent in Italy and an astonishing 15 percent in Britain. Now the Greens must come to grips with their own unexpected success. The question no longer is whether they can win votes; it is whether they can become a cohesive political force in the Europe of the 1990s.

Though they are united in their environmental crusade, the Greens are by no means a monolithic movement. Some Green parties are little more than single issue lobbies. Others have coniflicting agendas. All of the Greens espouse the politics of zero economic growth and favor some form of nuclear disarmament. But while the French Greens look forward to a single European market after 1992, the British Greens disapprove of the European Community. Some Green parties have long been split into hard-line and moderate camps. After 10 years West Germany’s Die Grünen are still divided between fundamentalists (known as the fundis), who oppose political compromise, and pragmatists (realos), who are prepared to serve as coalition partners with mainline parties. In contrast to most of them, France’s Les Verts seem almost bourgeois, reflecting the squeaky-clean style of their leader, Antoine Waechter, 40, a biologist by training.All of the Green parties have had difilculty gaining public acceptance, but the West German Grünen have had a particularly turbulent history. West Germany’s Greens began in the late 1970s as a grass-roots antinuclear and nonviolent political-protest movement. In 1983 the Greens for the first time won seats in the West German Bundestag, but still their popular image was that of a group of long-haired troublemakers. Party antics, such as marching into the Bundestag in jeans and love beads and carrying potted plants, did nothing to improve their standing. The party’s radical fundis and pragmatic realos were constantly—and publicly—at one another’s throats.

An electoral breakthrough: Earlier this year the Greens made what appeared to be a significant electoral breakthrough, entering "red-green" coalitions in Frankfurt and West Berlin with the Social Democratic Party. But although the party regularly wins a solid 8 percent of the nation’s vote, the prUnen appear to have been spoiled by their own success. "West German Greens have lost their explosive political force," says Hans-Jurgen Hoffmann, a voting analyst at Bonn’s Institute for Applied Social Science. "Their electorate has stabilized, and their environmental agenda has become part of the political mainstream." France’s Greens have succeeded by not alarming the electorate with extremist rhetoric. Ecology groups have existed in France since the 1970s but seldom won more than 3 to 4 percent of the popular vote. French voters never had much enthusiasm for pacifism, and they supported the country’s independent nuclear-strike capability and its dedication to nuclear energy. As leader of the Greens, Waechter has avoide 4 confronting voters head-on. Rather than advocating unilateral scrapping of French nuclear weapons, he says he prefers to see an end to French nuclear tests, then participation in multilateral disarmament. That reassuring style made it easier for the Greens to appeal to French voters worrie4 about the environment and disenchanted with the governing Socialists. Says Serg & July, editor of the daily Liberation: "This Greens offer a substitute for a governmental socialism that has lost its dream."

Britain’s Green Party is Europe’s odd man out. Although British Greens won 15 percent of the popular vote in the European parliamentary elections, Britain does not have proportional representation; no British Green won enough votes individually to be elected. Still, the party’s success was astonishing: in previous elections it had won a mere .3 percent. Most British commentators saw the Green tide as a protest against the mainstream parties. Norman Tebbit, former Conservative Party chairman, called the Greens "a dustbin for protest votes." Paddy Ashdown, leader of the Social and Liberal Democrats—who won only 7 percent of the vote—called the Greens "the fashionable depository for the disenchanted," and predicted sourly that their vote would prove "biodegradable." -

Like their cousins on the Continent, Britain’s Greens are supported primarily by better-educated people roughly between the ages of 25 and 45. Women are more apt to be Greens than men. Sara Parkin, a co-chairperson of the British Greens, believes that the rise of the Greens around Europe signals a widespread dismay and feeling of purposelessness on the part of the young. ‘People don’t look into the future with hope any longer," she says. "Young people are afraid because the global environment is destabilized. There is a feeling that we are out of control."

But establishment political observers suggest the British Greens would have considerably less appeal if voters knew more about what the party really stands for. Indeed, many voters may have been unaware that the Greens support unilateral nuclear disarmament and favor a nonaligned foreign policy. They oppose NATO, the European Community and construction of the channel tunnel. A favorite Green term is "unsustainable." Competition, growth, consumption, air travel, auto travel and road building are all deemed "unsustainable." The Green vision may be principled, but it is also unrealistic. "They don’t provide any account of how you get from where we are to where they want to be," says Ramyond Plant, a professor of politics at Southampton University. "It’s a beguiling sort of philosophy, but I don’t think it gives any indication how it might come about in the real world." Others have been more scathing. Richard North, environment correspondent for The Independent, recently described the movement as "the tyranny of the nice."

Still, the party gains new adherents every day. Last September it had only 7,000 members. Now it has well over 12,000. "We are the fastest-growing political movement this country has ever seen," boasts Lindsay Cooke, a Green spokesperson. "There is a quiet revolution going on."

In Strasbourg, the Green agenda will be based mainly on opposition to the most pro-business aspects of the EC’s plans for a single internal market in 1992. "Europe should be designed according to regions of ecological sustainability," says Parkin, "not 322 million shoppers in a European supermarket." Dorothee Piermont, a member of the West German Green delegation, warns that "sociological and social dumping will be the internal market’s most lasting consequences. Companies will invest in countries with the lowest ecological standards and worker compensation." But Europe’s Greens are far from united on strategy, and Parkin predicts that parties are more likely to join together on regional issues: Nordic Greens will tackle threats to the Baltic; southern Greens will rally on behalf of the Mediterranean. Beyond that, the Greens will continue in the role they have already played so well—that of keeping Europeans alert to the growing destruction of the environment.

-ANGUS DEMING with RUTH MARSHALL in Paris, JACOB WEISBERG in London and PEGGY

TRAUTMAN and KAREN BRESLAU in Bonn

Source : NEWSWEEK, July 10, 1989

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