The comforting trope that the German Greens came back from the political grave continues to proliferate. It’s not accurate. March 25, 2011
Posted by WorldbyStorm in European Politics, Irish Politics.trackback
I know I mentioned this earlier in the week, but today’s piece in the Irish Times was a bit hard to take.
The latest person to articulate this is Trevor Sargent. He’s quoted in the Irish Times as saying:
Sargent is also phlegmatic: “The German Greens were nearly wiped out in the last election, but are now up to 20 per cent in the polls,” he points out.
This is no end of an head scratcher for me.
I look in vain for evidence of a Green ‘wipe-out’, or even a ‘nearly’ wipe-out in 2009 at the Federal Eelctions and all I can see is a party that increased its representation by 2.6% to 10.7% and gained 17 seats to bring it up to 68.
According to wiki:
The two other parties represented in the Bundestag, the Left and the Greens, both made large gains [in 2009] and received the highest vote share of their respective histories.
Am I missing something? Does he mean in regional terms? Even if he does, and it is true that after the 2005 Election the Greens lost power at state level (though they retained 51 seats at national level), it’s not applicable. It’s simply not the same as the situation now facing the Irish Green Party.
They meet this weekend, and as one who even still wishes it somewhat well – and wishes that they’d throw some red in with the green, though I’m not at all optimistic on that score, I think they’d be much better appreciating the gravity of their situation rather than trying to make comparisons that simply don’t hold up.
mix red light and green light and you get yellow.
Looks like the Irish greens all along
Trevor Sargent may have made a mistake by saying “last” election. But in 1990 the Greens lost all their seats in West Germany and a alliance of Greens and the local Bündnis 90 got only 8 in East Germany. This was the only election in which West and East voted simultaneously but representation rights were given separately. In 1994 they returned with 49.
Hmmm… still not quite the same though, is it, not least because they didn’t lose in 1990 on foot of participation in Government, and they retained a presence as you say in the Bundestag through the East Germany component who in 93 merged with them.
In any event, if it were just Sargent then fair enough to an extent, but Dan Boyle said last week that “It’s not a unique experience,” he said. “The German Greens, the Belgian Greens and the Czech Greens have all had similar experiences. It’s something of a rite of passage almost for the Green Party in terms of their first experience of parliament, their first experience of government.” Which is also inaccurate even if we look at the 1990 example from Germany because that wasn’t the German Green Party’s first experience of parliament.
By the way, I’m still using that chart you did up on the left way back when. Excellent resource and many thanks.
No, again, I think it’s an imprecise comment in both Dan and Trevor’s example, but the central point is reasonable.
I don’t think that Greens will ever have the natural (or, arguably, constructed) traction or constituency that the classic left has, but I do think that there’s a semi-permanent niche there for parties like the Greens across Europe.
Setting aside the smaller points of Sargent mistaking the timing of the German elecotions, and Dan’s point about “parliament”, isn’t there something of a point there? The evolution (or, from another perspective, regression) of the Green/green vote?
The problem I think is that in neither instance do they get the chronology right, and worse they seem to be saying something quite distinctly different, ie that other parties in Europe have been through what they’ve been through. But the truth is they haven’t. A parliamentary collapse in the 1990 elections in Germany simply isn’t like the current situation for the GP. Nor is the point about ‘first experience of parliament’ terribly convincing, since other green parties have managed to get through that first experience of parliament or government without losing all their representation. As I said in the earlier post this week the situation they’re most like is the Czech GP which had 6 MPs and lost them all after government participation. But we have no way of knowing as of now whether they’ll get them back or not. So it’s hardly an happy precedent.
As for the broader point you make, I would have concerns that the green identity is now profoundly damaged here. I can’t begin to count the number of conversations I’ve had with people from the broadest possible spectrum of the electorate whose view of the GP ranges from them being mud to being fools. This is arguably unfair – even if like myself I believe that egregious errors were made across the last 3 and a half years, but its very real. I’m not for a moment disagreeing with you that the GP don’t have a natural constituency and I think that’s part of their fundamental problem both in terms of where they are now and where they’ve been over that period of government (and before).
I wonder though if there is inevitably a semi-permanent niche for the GP here now after this. I could see many things having to happen before they return to national representation. As I’ve said earlier in the week the necessity for a strong rigorous voice on climate change is absolutely there and will continue to be, but I wonder if it’s going to be the GP in its current form. I don’t think it will be.
The comments on balancing a long-term constituency for the Greens against short-term self-annihilation seem about right.
Just two further points on the initial German comparison which don’t seem to have been made. In 1990, the German Green vote dropped massively in the post-unification political circumstances. But it was not a catastrophic performance. In the 1987 election, they won 8.3% in the old FRG. In 1990, they won 4.8% in the old West and 6.2% in the East, amounting to a national vote of 3.8%. Not good, but not a wipeout. The key point in 1990 was that they fell under the 5% representation hurdle, both in the West and in the unified country as a whole, and so most of those votes did not translate into seats.
Second point is that Germany is a much more decentralized country than Ireland. I don’t have the data to hand, but the Greens would have had continued representation in numerous regional parliaments (though not I think at that point in government) and city governments, sustaining the party through the more difficult years at a federal level. A very different thing to county councils etc: it is not only that states wield important political powers and state parliaments are serious venues, there is also a matter of scale – Nordrhein-Westfalen, for example, has a population of 18 million people, Bavaria maybe 10 or 11 million. Even a small party in that context has substantial organizational weight and staying power.
That’s a crucial distinction too lamentreat. I guess what irks me a bit as well about this trope is that it’s such a generalization as if the experience of the Irish Green Party were easily mapped onto polities ten times as large as ours with fundamentally different structures, histories and so on.
Even to examine the 1990 German ‘collapse’ is to see that it occurred in a context utterly different to any we as a polity have or are likely to experience. Only short of a reunification process between North and South would it be even remotely comparable. In other words on every levels the comparisons are wrong.
Claiming that the German Greens were wiped out in the last election just looks like a deliberate falsehood. It’s slightly bizarre to suggest that Sargent somehow mistook the 2009 elections for the 1990 one. The problem for the Greens is that they signed off on some of the most dubious legislation the country has ever seen and propped up a thoroughly dysfunctional government for a couple of years, all in the name of a ‘responsibility,’ which was never explained. The most supine Labour participation in coalition government was full of principle by comparison. And if they think that their wipe-out in the election is just one of those swings and roundabouts things which will be cancelled out next time round, they really are a pack of fools. Then again, this is the party which had no problem with NAMA or the bank bail-outs but congratulated themselves on their rigour in getting one stag hunt banned and Willie O’Dea removed from the cabinet.
Signed off on dubious legislation? I thought Gormley took the phone call to come to the cabinet meeting but decided to stay in bed for that.
Ara, what are they going to say? We’ve alienated most of our supporters, possibly for ever and we might as well give up now? They have to come up with a line for their remaining members who are presumably at a very low ebb. At least they are hanging in there for their party and not walking off in a huff like McDowell.
Everyone knows it’s a line, I doubt they really believe it themselves. You are being very pedantic WbS!
Give it a few months when stag hunting is reintroduced, when FG loosen planning regs, when more of our state assets like bogs and forests are sold off, when corporate interests continue to have disproportionate influence, I think that some of their ex-supporters will see that they do represent something different and some will vote for them again. A green wing on a left coalition would be a good place for them but they can’t deliver on the left part of the equation.
Is there any more chance of that than a green revival?
This latest claim illustrates their talent for self-delusion.
What is important, however, is that the left vigorously takes up their more useful goals and takes them out of the realm of market incentives.
Take insulation, for example. The housing stock here, even the more recently built, leaks heat like almost no other European country. A state funded comprehensive, well inspected, insulation program that all could access (unlike the previous Green Party one which was targeted at the better off) would not only lead to economic stimulus but would also pay itself back in short order in terms of (actual, as opposed to tax arbitrage driven) trade deficit with the rising cost of fossil fuels.
Then there’s public transport, transparent control of planning etc. etc.
The same fuel inefficiency goes for offices, hospitals, schools, industrial plant – the list is pretty much universal.
Excellent point re the insulation programme. That does typify this GPs approach which seemed simply to have walked away from universalism in that regard (and many others).
You raise some interesting points Diana.
Firstly, I expect them to be honest, not dissembling, about their situation. And that doesn’t require them to say what you suggest at the start. Moreover it surely doesn’t (and I don’t know if it’s pedantic to point out that former Junior Ministers and Senators are putting out a completely misleading and inaccurate analysis) do them any service to be making statements that are so easily shown to be incorrect.
As regards your second point that sort of reminds me of what many I know inside the GP were saying a few short months ago before the election that once the reality of what was coming and what they’d done was there in a campaign then people would realize the difference they’d made. Problem is that it was so slight in the generality even if some of the achievements in the specific were good.
I’m highly dubious about the idea that Greens cannot deliver on the left part of the equation – Bahro, Gorz et al would seem to suggest the opposite, though I think you’re correct if you’re saying that this GP can’t (even if much of what you say earlier is part and parcel of a left agenda – state assets, planning regs, corporate interests being beaten back).
And look, I’m atypical on the left – a left that supplied many of the second preferences that helped GP people get elected – because I still have time for the broader green project. Consider though EamonnCork who’d be politically extremely generous spirited and his response above.
Those votes aren’t coming back to this GP.
I’m not sure you’re so atypical WBS. Hasn’t the Fourth Int’l (or one of them anyway) redefined itself as ecosocialist for example. It’s probably fair to say though that the Left here in Ireland is lagging a little on the ecosocialist thing. But maybe the demise of the GP will push that along a little as a side effect.
That’s an interesting thought, that in the absence of a GP the left might get its act together on ecosocialism. It’s worth remembering that inside the WP there was a strand of red green thinking though the whole DL thing screwed that up.
I’d say there is a big opportunity to move in this direction LATC.
The other aspect of the Green’s performance in government has been the contempt so many people across a wide range of bankground now have for measures to ameliorate AGW. To be fair this is not entirely the Green’s fault, but also the result of a globally well-funded campaign by the fossil fuel industry and their allies.
However, for now, it means that arguments and policies for sustainability have to be couched in economic stimulus and cost reduction terms. And ethics are out of the question, unfortunately. The hopeful thing is that renewable energy is now accepted across the spectrum as one of the things we can make and possibly export.
If the Greens are really in reflective mode they might reflect on why they are so despised in every rural constituency, for reasons that have little to do with their support for FF in coalition. Nor is the explanation a total lack of civilisation or care for the environment on the part of the denizens of rural Ireland.
I live part of each year in an agricultural area and was there for the election – I was quite taken aback by the visceral hatred of the Greens and the jeering their candidates got at the count. They are totally unable to appeal to the people who actually live in the countryside and care for it on a day-to-day basis. The perception is that they are a sort of mixture of An Taisce and your junior infants teacher, constantly telling you what you should do and should want and how to do your job or care for your area.
They have a valuable perspective to offer, so they should start with humility and rebuild by asking people who care about the places they live in, how they can work together to make them cleaner and healthier. Telling them how naughty they are to enjoy hunting or how they shouldn’t worry about competitiveness in agricultural production – that hasn’t worked.
There’s a lot of sense in what you’re saying there alright. Part of the antipathy, at least in my experience, lies in the difficulty that land-owning rural dwellers face in making a living from farming. Many of them don’t work in farming full-time, there’s not much of a living to be had from it, and during the boom years there was a lot of additional income generated via construction, whether that was through labouring on construction sites or through selling sites for one-off housing. Either way, rural one-off housing is/was a big contributor to local economies. That the GP appeared to look down its nose from the leafy Dublin suburbs at such economic activity is certainly part of the reason behind the distruct between the rural community and the Greens. Not saying that it can all be simply reduced to economics, but it’s a component which figured large in the mindset of the land-owning section at least.
Except they only had one and a half seats in rural areas so that was hardly their base either. Mary White’s one was clearly rural, though an interesting mix. Trevor Sargents perhaps less clearly so. Even putting those two aside, and in truth Sargent was the one along with Ryan with the closest shout at a seat, and who polled relatively well all things considered, it’s very hard to believe that the stag hunting ban impinged on say Gogarty, or Ryan, or Gormley or even Cuffe. Quite the opposite, that would have been grist to the mill of most of those who voted for them left centre or FG voting right.
Of non-elected reps how to explain how Mark Dearey did reasonably well as well in a rural constituency?
I’d tend more to the view that what sunk them was that they went in with FF and they stayed and they stayed and they stayed.
And what EamonnCork said.
I know that rural seats weren’t their base – but surely they should be for a Green Party. I was only trying to make the point that the Greens won’t be making any comeback, not just because they have the coalition on their rap sheet, but because they go out of their way to make enemies of potential rural voters by adopting positions that are antipathetic to the rural economy – presumably with the intention of pleasing an urban bien pensant constituency. Rather neatly, they’ve divided the electorate and antagonised both halves, for different reasons.
There’s definitely something in what you say as regard the lack of a base there, the only thing that I’d add is that with hunting how much of that(and I’m talking here about stags) is perception as against reality, ie only a small fraction of those in rural areas are involved yet it gets up a broader groups back because they think greens want to stop everything.
Btw one of the strongest consistent anti blood sports voices in the Dail was Tony Gregory.
I’m sorry to bang on about insulation, but I was just thinking how regressive the Greens insulation grants were. You had to have the capital to stump up for about 50% of the insulation costs, or improvements in heating systems.
Effectively the upper middle classes took advantage of this, and as a result the relative fuel poverty of the poors (sic) was increased. A class act.
Entirely regressive. In every sense. And the idea itself is brilliant, it’s a great thing to do.
Even the Warmer Home Scheme?
Which is only available to those making use of the fuel allowance scheme and AFAIK provide a grant of 100% of the cost of insulation.
Limited though isn’t it in terms of what it covers?
16k houses covered, according to former minister Ryan. Total notional budget €26m.
I suspect this is a drop in the ocean of the tens if not hundreds of thousands of homes in fuel poverty. The options didn’t include improvements in heating system efficiency available to those who could afford the other schemes.
I guess they are trying to get some lift out of the German results.
It’s still exit polls but it looks like the German Greens could be the senior partner in Baden-Württemberg (an historic defeat for the CDU in it’s heartland), and junior in Rheinland-Pfalz (both with the SDP).
Merkel may well try to cosy up to them and go back to rapid phasing out of nuclear power because the explicitly neo-liberal FDP are going the way of the PDs here.
It may also have an effect upon the attitude to bailing out banks, both other countries and German banks – the German Greens are at least at the manifesto level suspicious of global finance capital. What this will mean in government is another question.
Regrettably die Linke didn’t get the 5% necessary to take seats in either Länder – but the party is very young in these more conservative parts of the former Federal Republic.
Vote movement analysis at eurotrib suggests many die Linke voters tactically switched to die Grünen to get rid of the CDU.
Last comment I promise – the Pirate Party (radical internet liberties and copyleft promoters/obsessives) and die Linke both got over 1% which entitles them to state financial support as political parties.
Commentary on the German GP electoral success:
http://politicalaffairs.net/germany-the-greens-win-the-day-in-two-state-elections/
“They had frequently forgotten that whenever the Greens have gained power and influence they have all too often neglected many or most of their loudly proclaimed principles. They now represent, more than ever, a well-educated, fairly prosperous sector with few ties to people on the lower rungs of economic ladders. It remains to be seen whether this will remain so.”
That’s the issue really, isn’t it.
That, indeed, is the question.
That’s a well written blog LATC – thanks for bringing it to my attention. The recent history of the CPUSA is one of the many things about which I knew nada and now imagine I know very slightly more than nada – the Wikipedia article seems fair enough.
Getting back to the German Greens, the consequence of the shutting of nuclear power plants will entail a drastic and rapid energy saving programme, burning more gas or coal, or seriously promoted renewable development. The second option could hardly be described as green, but would be the path of least resistance.
On the CP-USA, Garibaldy posted this a few weeks ago on his blog:
http://garibaldy.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-socialist-party-in-the-21st-century-the-future-of-the-cpusa/
And that looks like a significant bit of learning too – thanks again – better leave it till my attention span is improved overnight.
What worries me most about the Greens is an absence of soul searching that one would normally expect. There is a sleepwalking element to their post-election approach – less arrogance and more shock I would say. This is why WBS is right to point out the silliness of comparing their situation to the German Greens – because the comparison isn’t done to provide a pep talk to the troops but to hide from the reality of their defeat.
Chatting briefly to someone who was at their conference over the weekend, it seems that they haven’t accepted that what they did in government was their fault, in brief. Even to the extent that some were talking of their time in government as a success. It is strange and self-deluding.
Of course this mirrors their strange attitude in govenrment – that all the bad things belonged to Fianna Fail whereas the odd environmental decision (and I remember when the Green Party was about more than the environment) was their success. The question is whether too many of the critical members have long left, leaving the rest to this awful self-deluding groupthink, which probably isn’t even fooling themselves.
Excellent analysis David L which I think touches on a significant part of the problem, a lack of perspective that blinds them. Something that really surprised me was how little they seemed to recognise how much not merely their own previous vote, but also more generally, dislikes them.
Cheers, it does seem they’re in the electorally awkward position of being controversial without being radical. So they have the generality of the population despising them (I don’t think that’s too harsh a word) without the strong bedrock of support that a party which took strong positions might expect.
It is depressing that even as a niche party, they might not make the grade. Like yourself I think, I’d be well disposed to the idea of a Green Party, if not the practices of this one.