My take on the EU elections
This article was originally released as an edition of my newsletter.
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Christ, I am tired. Like Macron hauling himself in front of a TV camera to admit a historic defeat and then announce that he wants an even bigger one in three weeks time, I dragged myself out of bed early this morning with the aid of some noisy construction workers outside in order to write this newsletter.
I’m tired because last night I joined the election watch party of the European Greens - starting in a packed European Parliament room, watching the first exit polls from Germany, and ending in a conspicuously empty bar with a friend from the French-speaking Belgian Greens comparing his party’s night to Brazil’s 7-1 defeat to Germany in the 2014 World Cup semi-finals on home soil. Quite bad, in other words.
Here are my reflections on the night. I’m not tribal about politics - I’m happy to see parties and politicians win who have good ideas, whether they are from the Greens or other progressive parties. But obviously, given who I was surrounded by, my analysis is more focused on the Greens than anyone else.
Enjoy x
This is a Politico’s graph showing the projected make-up of teh European Parliament. The final numbers will almost certainly change a bit, as the results are finalised and the likes of Ireland finally finish counting. But the trends are clear: the Conservatives have consolidated while the Social Democrats and the left have dodged the big losses that the Liberals and Greens have fallen to. Oh yeah, and the far-right achieved their biggest ever result.
Overall, for us progressives, this is bad but it could have been a lot worse. (Unless you’re French. Or German.)
It’s worth putting the Greens’ result in perspective.
Two-thirds of the projected losses Green come from France and Germany alone.
In the case of Germany, it is partly the almost inevitable result of being a junior coalition partner with two parties who are more conservative. I would argue that it is also the party reverting to mean. In other words, the result for the German Greens in 2019 was exceptionally good, and it is entirely expected that a party that wins 20.5% in a European election, having never got more than 12.5% previously, will slip back towards 12%. This is in line with my previous findings on the impact of going into government on Green Party support. Greens tend to enter government on a wave of new, fickle voters, who then tend to float over to other parties in the next election - whether they enter government or not. It is logical that this voting behaviour also applies in a European election to a Green Party that is in government during a state of polycrisis, and that just achieved
Whisper it quietly but, in historical terms, the German Greens did okay.
They even have one more MEP than they won ten years ago. That’s not to say that the German Greens did as well as they could. No. The more centrist wing of the party ensured that the party ran an overly conservative and protective campaign, in which they avoided making outlandish promises that would not be befitting of a party in government with Olaf Sholz and the Liberals.
This is strategically nonsensical, I would argue. If the party had run the sort of bold campaign that the Greens at the European level ran then they could have shown voters that they are still a party of change, and it is their coalition partners who are holding them back. They didn’t, and they were punished for it. But again, it could be a lot worse.
The case of France is different. The French Greens, like the Germans, are a fairly established party in the political system and exist in a country where there is strong civil society and a sizeable electorate for Green-left-progressive parties. Unlike the Germans, they are not in government. They are an opposition party who could rail against the establishment and pick up discontented progressive voters. But they don’t. Instead, the party scraped over the threshold to make it into the European Parliament, which I would argue is less a reflection on the effectiveness of this campaign, and more a sign of deep, long-term malaise in a party that has a good vision for a better world but is internally dysfunctional and lacking in strategy and resources.
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And let’s not forget - there are a number of success stories
Okay, I’ve run out of time to write this section. Read the section at the bottom for some progressive success stories! I better use this time left to talk about the biggest danger to our democracies.
The biggest story of this election is the rise of the far-right .
This is scary. It’s disastrous. We should be worried.
I’m as confused as everyone else why Macron called an election right after an embarrassing defeat to the far-right. He’s mirroring Pedro Sanchez’s strategy in Spain, who called national elections right after a right-wing scalp in the local elections, and who then managed to win a progressive-Green-left government against all odds. But Macron is not Sanchez. And Macron, unlike Sanchez, had three years to turn things around before the election would have taken place.
One theory is that Macron wants to put the far-right in government so that they show themselves as inept in government and . This is outlandish. But so is every other possible explanation.
If Macron, like the liberals in the Netherlands, have given a chunk of power to the far-right in the expectation that they won’t use it effectively, then they might do well to read a history book on 1930’s Germany to see how effective this strategy can be.
But what goes in on Macron’s stupid head is not that important. What is important is what we do now.
Now the real work begins.
Let’s look at the places where progressives have succeeded, like the Greens in Latvia and the Netherlands, and the left and Greens in the nordics. Let’s look at how the far-right are organising online, let’s abandon the leftist scepticism of technology that is holding us back, and get serious about revolutionising progressive organising online.
Scream into your pillow if you need to. But then let’s get back to work.
Personally, I will focus my activism for the next week or two on trying to bring people into the movement who are motivated by fear into doing something. Every post-election hangover is an opportunity for engagement in movements, NGOs and parties. And most organisations miss out on this.
Then, I will keep the cogs of my organising work turning over summer, but I will focus more of my energy on strategic reflection. For the past two years, I’ve been in a constant “get shit done” frame of mind. Now, it’s time for me to burn through that reading list that’s been hanging over me, and put time into big picture reflections of why we are where we are and how to change course.
My space for this reflections is here. My aim is to increase frequency of this to once every two weeks, and I hope it will be useful for our collective learning.
Because fuck, we need to do better.
STUFF WORTH KNOWING: EU ELECTION VERSION
This week, this section looks a bit different than normal. Instead of resources and stories from the world of social change, here is a non-exhaustive list of the stories that caught my eye.
🇳🇱 In the Netherlands, the Green-Social Democratic party grew to the largest party ahead of Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom showing that the left can come back to beat the far-right where they mobilise enough voters. My friend and courageous candidate Catarina Vieria might even sneak into the European Parliament against all expectation. Oh, and in case you missed it, the far-right got one less seat than originally projected 💅
🇦🇹 The far-right won a national election for the first time ever, and a sexist smear campaign against the lead candidate of the Greens Lena Schilling, a 23 year-old climate activist, helped to shrink the Green contingent from three MEPs to two.
🇩🇪 The Left, Greens and Social Democrats all went down in voteshare. Only the conservatives, far-right and the left-socially conservative party of Sahra Wagenknecht gained in voteshare. Jeez.
🇱🇻 In Latvia the Progressives, a new green-Social Democratic party in Latvia, and the only party in the country NOT campaigning against a Green Deal, elected their first ever MEP.
🇭🇷 Similar success story for Možemo in Croatia, a really exciting and innovative Green Party who just elected their first MEP.
🇧🇪 For me, the biggest disappointment from a bad evening in Belgium is that the radical left party, expected to romp home to victory, underperformed. Then there’s the fact that Ecolo got hammered, and the really-right-wing-and-arguably-far-right New Flemish Alliance Party and pretending-to-be-liberal-but-actually-right-wing MR both won big. At the national level, Belgium looks even more ungovernable than last time round, when the country set a world record for the longest time without a government. So the Prime Minster resigned, and God knows what will happen. On the other hand, the Flemish-speaking Greens did quite well and Flemish far-right didn’t achieve the massive surge they were projected.
🇵🇱 The Civic Platform alliance of pro-democracy parties, led by Donal Tusk, defeated the far-right to win the the election.
🇩🇰 In Denmark, the left-Green SF WON the election with the Social Democrats in second and the liberals doing well. Happy days.
🇸🇪 In Sweden, the Greens and Left both grew and the Greens are now the third largest party, ahead of the recently victorious far-right.
🇫🇮 To round off a night of Nordic delight, the Finnish Left and Greens both did well, getting two MEPs each.
🇮🇹 The biggest surprise of my night was the Italian Green-left alliance, who, despite being made up of fairly dysfunctional parties, massively outperformed expectations to achieve around 6%. For context, the far-right Lega, who a few years ago were the largest party in the country, achieved 8%. Obviously, it’s still disastrous that Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy are bringing home 28% of the vote. But a small flame of progressive resistance just suddenly appeared, sparked by brilliant people like climate-activist-turned-candidate Giovanni Mori and my dear friend and fellow Young European Greens Co-spokesperson, Benedetta Scuderi.