” The Green Parties “

The Greens’ success has clear policy implications, especially on issues of nuclear power, ecological tax reform, and citizenship rights. But success also has implications for green parties themselves. Greens have always faced a unique ‘strategic conundrum’ arising from their unique beliefs and movement roots. Put simply, how can they reconcile their radical alternative politics with participation in mainstream or ‘grey’ parliamentary and government structures?

Throughout the 1990s most green parties shed their radical cloth in an attempt to capture votes, even at the expense of green party unity and purity. Most were rewarded with electoral success well beyond what had been imaginable in the 1980s. The price to pay has been tortured internal debates about strategy, and new questions about green party identity and purpose. Today the key questions facing green parties revolve around not whether to embrace power, but what to do with it. More specifically, green parties face three new challenges in the new millennium:

First, how to carve out a policy niche as established parties and government become wiser to green demands, and as green concerns themselves appear more main stream.

Second, how to take green ideas beyond the confines of rich industrialized states into Eastern Europe and the developing world where green parties remain marginal and environmental problems acute.

Third, how to ensure that the broader role of green parties – as consciousness raisers, agitators, conscience of parliament and politics – is not sacrificed on the altar of electoral success. Green parties have come a long way since their emergence and development in the 1970s and 1980s. They have become established players able to shape party competition, government formation and government policy. But this very ‘establishment’ carries risks for a party whose core values and identities depend mightily on their ability to challenge the conventional order, to agitate and to annoy. For most green parties, the greatest fear is not electoral decline so much as the prospect of becoming a party with parliamentary platform, ministerial voice, but nothing new to say.