Europe's Green Light

...Green candidates made a breakthrough in municipal elections in France last March, giving a foretaste of their entrance into the European Parliament in June...

...The Socialists were returned to power in France last year, and are beginning to show signs of inching back toward leftist positions they abandoned six years ago...

...Doing this without a mass movement may prove difficult...

...With the coalition question settled, and the need to compromise with the SPD widely accepted, a small minority of ultra-Realos have gone on to try to change the party into something they consider more modern...

...The Dutch example also shows that rejection of free-market ideology is not the monopoly of the Left...

...Les Verts and Die Griinen are, however, as different as the political cultures of their two countries...

...Juquin centered his campaign on the demand for voting rights for immigrants, an issue that could hold together the various leftist groups supporting him, but with minimal appeal to voters...

...The Griinen committed themselves to being "ecological, social, grassroots-democratic, and nonviolent...

...At the same time, they adopted four guiding principles that, in effect, situated them on the Left...

...All this raises questions about the future of Green politics as an ally and stimulus to progressive social movements and the political Left...

...The first successful Green party, the German Griinen, coined the slogan "neither Left nor Right but ahead...

...The Dutch example is a sign that worship of the deregulated free market is meeting its nemesis not in the hardship it inflicts on poor people, but in an ecological crisis that could pull the earth right out from under everybody, rich and poor alike...

...The conservative government headed by Christian Democratic Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers had introduced a major National Environment Plan aimed at reducing pollution by 70 per cent by the year 2010...

...Still, Waechter's program sounds essentially leftist: concern for renewal of democracy, for combatting unemployment, for disarmament and solidarity with the Third World...

...If the planet warms and ocean levels rise, the Netherlands will vanish under the seas...

...Two years ago, at the end of a long process of splits, a stolid young Alsatian named Antoine Waechter won leadership of Les Verts, based on rejection of "Left" identification or alliances...

...The implications for the future of autonomous "Green" politics are contradictory...

...Right-wing Realo positions have scant chance of prevailing within the Griinen...

...A greened social democracy could be the main political trend in a new, independent Europe, after forty years of Cold War bondage...

...As for nonviolence, this in its broadest sense implies disarmament and the renunciation of war as a means to settle disputes between nations...

...The party as a whole has come around to what could be called a cautious Realo position...

...They have pioneered real political equality between women and men, presenting lists of candidates with women and men alternating, ensuring women an equal or superior number of elected posts...

...Queen Beatrix and the Prince of Wales are speaking out for the environment...

...Juquin was far better known, and had won public sympathy for the way he had tried to reform the French Communist Party...

...The self-styled realists (Realos) argued for the need to compromise, and labeled their adversaries "Fundis" or fundamentalists...

...His candidacy was supported by a genuine mass movement...

...There has been no head-on conflict such as took place in Italy when Greens demanding the shutdown of a polluting chemical plant were physically attacked by workers...

...Alarm over the environment is providing a popular cause for a conser-vativism more worthy of the name than Thatcherite greed...

...The emergence of Greens in France as well as Germany seems to offer the opportunity for an important measure of political convergence in the European Community...

...In the past few months, after years of jeering at Greens as cave men, the French media have been receptive to ecological themes...

...Social" has meant tackling the difficult task of reconciling social justice with a radical criticism of the existing model for economic growth, with its promise to all of unlimited consumer goods...

...The opportunity for France to develop a rough equivalent of the German Griinen was lost last year when former Communist Pierre Juquin, running as a "red-green" candidate in the presidential election, got only 2 per cent of the vote compared to Waechter's 3.8 per cent...

...Italy could be encouraged to try the first non-Christian-Democratic-run government since World War II, with the Socialists and Communists, already trying to be more green than red, in coalition with the Italian Greens, the Verdi...

...Juquin needed to be more conspicuously green to overcome his red past, and this he failed to do, even though the Griinen were his model...

...Above the fray stands the grand old man of French ecology, eighty-four-year-old agronomist Rene Dumont, the first ecological candidate for president back in 1974...

...The leader of the Liberal party ("liberal" in the European sense of favoring the free market) objected to a tax on motorists that could handicap the flourishing Dutch trucking business...

...The German Green Party was formed by merging a wide range of environmentalist and leftist activists, ranging from An-throposophs to Maoists...

...In contrast, Les Verts are closer to an exclusive club than to a mass movement...

...An important success of the Griinen was their useful recycling of much of the Far Left...

...Lubbers is one of Diana Johnstone is based in Paris as the European editor of In These Times...

...A further scare was provided in March by an international conference in The Hague on the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect...

...Waechter was lucky in his timing...

...Of course, the "grass roots" are not always right...

...They favor a shift of farm policy away from promoting surpluses for export toward preservation of farmland and farmers...

...The purer Greens want to clear out all that riffraff...

...However, Les Verts have so far not insisted very hard on that one...

...After Germany and Belgium, Greens have been elected to parliaments in other European Community (EC) countries—Italy, Portugal, and Luxemburg—and to the EC Parliament, as well as to non-EC European countries: Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, and Austria...

...Hostility to the Left may be meant as a defense against a return to the self-destructive sectarianism of the 1970s, but Les Verts risk a new kind of exclusive sectarianism of their own...

...The Griinen have not solved the contradictions between ecological and social demands, but some at least—especially the "Ecosocial-ist" current—have sought common ground with labor, despite conflicting evaluations of the virtues of industrial growth...

...There is no fair media treatment of other Green themes, least of all disarmament...

...On the other, media attention and electoral success may tend to detach the environmental theme from the broader context of pioneer Green politics...

...On the one hand, a Green vote is developing in various European countries...

...However, Realos with good media contacts campaign over the heads of the party, using their favorable media images to discredit their supposedly "Fundi" adversaries...

...But mainstream media tend to favor what is superficial and conventional, and their stereotypes reach more voters than the soberly analytic position papers churned out by Griinen party members...

...From the start of the European Parliament campaign, the French Greens were looking forward to forming a pure Green faction in the European Parliament, dissolving the "Rainbow Faction," where the German Greens have hung out with a motley band of political mavericks ranging from an amiable Dutch mix of pacifists, feminists, and ultra-renovated Eurocommunists, to Democrazia Prole-taria, a sort of "Catho-Communist" Italian radical group strong on Third World solidarity...

...A precise and impassioned critic of the ruinous "development" of Africa, Dumont has both a zest for combat and an exceptional grasp of the global dimensions of ecological disaster—but the French Green movement has never been able to make the most of such an asset...

...Waechter's campaign depended on television...

...The pure Greens, French style, seem to count on the lightness of their message to get through to voters...

...The differences between the Griinen and Verts programs are not so much in their broad outlines as in their specific development, which in the French case tends to be very thin...

...The attachment of Europe's royal families to environmental protection may seem merely picturesque, but it has its political significance...

...Her Outsider column appears in The Progressive four times a year...

...For all the differences between them, France and West Germany seem for the first time to be drawn into a similar political trend...

...In Western Europe, proportional representation allows Greens to enter parliaments with as little as 1 per cent of the vote in Italy, or 5 per cent in Germany and France...

...Only Britain (like the United States) blocks the expression of minorities with its winner-take-all district electoral system...

...Waechter has had reasonably sympathetic media coverage, so long as he sticks to water and air pollution...

...The Griinen practice an exceptional degree of inner-party democracy...

...Waechter is said to lack charisma...

...Thus "grassroots democracy" finds itself directly threatened by the importance of the media in presenting political debate to the general public...

...Greens had nothing to do with it...

...Socialists are strong in most of the other EC countries...

...In West Germany, a Red-Green government looks likely next year...

...Environmental cleanup is shaping up as the motor of a new Keynesian injection of public funding into the economy...

...These ultras, mostly collaborators of media favorites Otto Schily and Joschka Fischer, want a party of environmental pragmatists, at home in the existing system...

...Later, Juquin came out for Les Verts in the European Parliamentary elections, and various orphans of the New Left have been trying to get a foot into Les Verts' tight door...

...These positions are on the extreme right of the Griinen, and even to the right of the SPD...

...In the past couple of years, this quarrel has evolved considerably...

...The overwhelming majority of Greens, including the "Ecosocialist" left, now support "Red-Green" coalitions with the SPD in West Berlin and Frankfurt and an eventual Red-Green West German government in Bonn, if the two parties win a majority in Bundestag elections late next year...

...Theorists like Udo Knapp and Jurgen Schnappertz call for forthright identification with NATO and with the economically more favored young urban professionals who make up most of the Green electorate...

...Drinking water may soon have to be imported...

...Clean little Holland, once famous for its dairy-maid freshness and obsessive house-washing, was warned in an official report last December that it must spend 3.5 per cent of its gross national product for the next twenty years on reducing pollution or choke on it...

...They persist in tacking the "Fundi" label on anyone who disagrees with them...

...In her Christmas message, Queen Beatrix warned that the very Creation is in jeopardy...

...The French ecological movement has been decimated by fifteen years of internal rivalries all too typical of current French political life in general, where mass movements tend to be ignored and discouraged by feuding leaders...

...the few European leaders in favor of new NATO short-range nuclear missiles...

...Fourteen million people share the crowded Netherlands with more than twelve million pigs, five million cows, and ninety million chickens, whose droppings are poisoning the ground water...

...He got control of the French Green trademark just when media revelations of the ozone hole and the greenhouse effect, as well as a whole range of local pollution crises, were producing a green electorate...

...But his grown-up Boy Scout, clean-green, earnest image has counteracted years of French media propaganda depicting Greens—especially German Greens—as the greatest threat to civilization since the invasion of the Vandals...

...The French Greens want to start fresh...

...In May, the Dutch government fell in a dispute over its environmental policy— the first time a government crisis has occurred over an environmental issue...

...These principles have been challenged in the course of factional strife inside the Griinen between "Realos" and "Fundis...

...Green movements are among the first fruits of the growing pluralism in Eastern Europe...

...Greens oppose the EC as a "superstate," advocating regional development and an internationalism that goes beyond EC borders, notably toward Eastern Europe and the Third World...

...At the outset, this fight seemed to be about whether or not to seek a share of power in coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD...