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Europe’s green movement is in a strange place. The effects of global warming are becoming more apparent with each passing year, the number of people concerned about climate change is rising, and climate protests are the backdrop to daily life. Yet two months ago in the European elections, the Greens went sharply backwards, losing a quarter of their seats in the European parliament and dropping from fourth to sixth place.
In Germany, the Greens have been haemorrhaging votes and currently poll at just 10 per cent, their lowest level of support in seven years and well behind the hard-right AfD. In the UK, the Green party hit a record high in last month’s general election, winning four seats in the Commons, up from the single seat it has held since 2010. But within weeks, the new MPs were fighting accusations of hypocrisy on net zero policy and scrambling to see off internal dissent.
Over recent decades, Green parties have proved adept at picking up votes while out of power, but on entering government their support tends to wane almost immediately.
And alongside the mixed electoral picture, the policy stances can look a little odd, too. In Germany, carbon emissions from power generation rose sharply in 2022 as Green ministers accelerated the shutdown of nuclear plants. In the UK, only days after the Greens’ electoral success, the party’s co-leader was criticised by figures in the wind power industry after he came out in opposition to new clean energy infrastructure. In the US too, environmental campaign groups have been working hard to block tens of gigawatts of new solar power, offshore wind and transmission lines on conservation grounds.
All these contradictions are caused by the same thing: the increasingly diverse nature of Green voter coalitions, which today draw support from several quite distinct groups: older and more conservative environmentalists, younger proponents of decarbonisation, and deeply progressive protest voters. Stack them together and these groups add up to a sizeable vote but not a durable coalition.
While Greens are out of power, these dividing lines are masked; all three segments vote for their own idea of what the Greens represent. Once the party is a parliamentary grouping putting out statements and or taking actions in government, one or more segments tends to discover that the real Greens look quite different from their imagined ideal.
This was especially apparent at last month’s UK general election, where British Election Study data shows the Green party received a huge influx of the most fiercely leftwing voters in the electorate, most of them Corbynites seeking a new home after leaving Keir Starmer’s moderate Labour party. In 2019, these hyper-progressives accounted for 1 in 10 Green voters, now it’s 1 in 4.
This new faction gave co-leader Carla Denyer a headache by attacking her for thanking Joe Biden for withdrawing from the US presidential race. A respectful statement, appropriate for a party that wants to step up from peripheral protest to become a mainstream force, was met with demands for a retraction from those hostile to Biden’s support for Israel.
In Germany, loss of support among young voters has been blamed in part on the party’s shift from pacifism to support for Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s invasion. Moderate voters have been put off by a poorly implemented heat pump policy and a sense that the climate movement has become too radical.
But repeated declarations of a climate emergency followed by attempts to block new clean energy is the biggest contradiction of all, causing fierce infighting on both sides of the Atlantic.
While the Greens have had an influx of young “yes in my backyard” voters, they are still outnumbered by their Nimby bedfellows. In the UK, even when it comes to renewable energy, Green voters are more likely than Labour or Lib Dem supporters to oppose onshore wind farms. Together with the evidence from locally made decisions, this shows that Green voters and politicians care less about addressing the climate crisis than the mainstream centre left.
Green parties seem stuck in a self-limiting cycle: increasing popularity and entry into power exposes contradictions and limits further growth. The Greens are right that we are facing a climate crisis but unless they make a choice about who they want to represent and what they are prepared to do to curtail carbon emissions, they will remain on the sidelines as mainstream parties drive decarbonisation forwards.
john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch
