Positive News For The Green Movement

First Published Date: June 26, 2009 ADawnJournal.com

The elections for the European Parliament at the beginning of June have presented some very positive news for the Green movement, against a backdrop of seeming apathy towards politics in general outside of economic protest votes. From a greatly reduced pie (736 parliamentary seats, down from 2004’s total of 785), the continent’s Green parties demonstrated a real rise in popularity, picking up an additional eleven seats, which took them from 43 in 2004 to a hugely impressive 54 seats. France and Germany were the epicentre of the improvement in the Green vote, each bestowing 14 seats on their respective Green parties, while most other countries voting for the parliament also delivered at least one seat.

This comes against the backdrop of what has been considered to be the “recession election”, which had threatened to become a procession of punishment for the governing parties in favour of some of the more cynical, populist parties. In the United Kingdom, where the unpopular Labour government has been the subject of scandal after scandal and is due to lose its place as the governing party at next year’s general election, the Greens increased their share of the vote by 2.5% – better than any of the established parties and considerably better than the highly publicized far-right British National Party. Due to the vagaries of the voting system, however, the Greens and the BNP ended up with two seats each, with much of the publicity going to the more headline-friendly far-right organization.

In France, however, the story was better yet, with the Greens taking third place behind the ruling centre-right coalition and the opposition Socialists. The interesting aspect to this story is that there has been a Europe-wide trend in the media pointing up issues such as immigration, national and cultural identity and issues that are euphemistically referred to as “family values”. The success and increase of the vote for the Green parties – even on a reduced turnout against the backdrop of voter apathy – does seem to point to a recognition among voters that the environment is important, and that Green politicians are well-placed to understand the challenges that we face as a world, and the issues that Europe as a continent is currently facing.

Among all the other matters that Green politics cover, there seems to be an increasing recognition that concern for the environment and for the economy are not mutually exclusive. Clean energy can be cheap energy, renewable energy can be affordable energy, and this can be a way of solving problems using joined-up thinking. Among the many initiatives supported by the pan-European Green parties are moves towards the improvement of public transport initiatives – reducing emissions and at the same time providing the public with a better choice – as well as issues of personal and individual freedoms. This Europe-wide endorsement of the Green message is one that can be taken as a positive sign that people are taking notice of the planet we share and will give to our children. Long may it continue.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Thegreenlivingblog.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to A Dawn Journal. This article originally published on the above website on June 26, 2009.

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