Why Europe’s Green wave slows to a trickle in the east

Why Europe’s Green wave slows to a trickle in the east

Voters favor pocketbook issues over ‘post-material’ values.

By          NICK ASHDOWN              8/2/19, 1:40 PM CET Updated 8/13/19, 4:38 AM CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-green-wave-struggles-in-east/

Although the Green parties in Eastern Europe have not been successful so far, environmental activism continues | Martyn Aim/Getty Images

For Europe’s Greens, the Iron Curtain has yet to fall.

The results of this year's European Parliament election confirmed the existence of a clear east-west divide on the Continent: The so-called Green wave that swept through countries like Germany, France, Belgium and Ireland barely caused ripples among the EU’s newer members.

Green parties got 2.2 percent of the vote in Hungary, 1.8 percent in Croatia and negligible support in Bulgaria and Romania. Only six of 75 MEPs who sit in the Greens-European Free Alliance bloc come from countries that joined the EU after 2004.

The geographical disparity in the movement’s fortunes poses a puzzle to environmentally minded politicians, in the east as well as in Europe more widely: How can the Greens win over voters in less prosperous parts of the EU?

The heart of the challenge, analysts and Green politicians say, is economic. Voters in Central and Eastern Europe tend to be focused more on bread-and-butter issues instead of what scholars call the “post-materialist” values championed by the Greens.

The only Green party in Eastern Europe that’s managed a sustained success is Hungary’s LMP, which has won parliamentary seats in three consecutive national elections since 2010.

A Eurobarometer survey carried out before the European election showed that addressing climate change is a top priority across much of Western and Northern Europe, but not so much anywhere else on the Continent.

“If you earn the Hungarian minimum wage, we cannot expect you to buy food that’s twice as expensive just because it’s environmentally sourced,” said Péter Ungár, a lawmaker with Hungary’s Politics Can Be Different (LMP), a Green party that failed to win any seats in the European Parliament.

Central and Eastern European countries also tend to be more dependent on fossil fuels for their energy needs, making emission cuts more expensive and thus harder to sell to a skeptical electorate. The European Commission's proposal for a 2050 net zero emissions target was recently vetoed by Poland, with support from Hungary and the Czech Republic.

But it’s not that voters in the east don’t care about the environment.

Activists protesting destructive industrial practices in places like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary formed Green parties in the late 1980s and joined umbrella democracy movements against the ruling communist parties.

“In almost all countries, [Greens] introduced their representatives to parliament and/or [were part of] government, usually as a partner within a broad coalition of anti-communist opposition,” said Agnieszka Kwiatkowska, a sociology professor at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw.

But these early successes had virtually vanished by the end of the 1990s, as the turbulent post-communist transition pushed other issues to the forefront of the political debate.

Environmental activism continues in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, which have disproportionately high levels of pollution, but it generally remains confined to civil society — with its most prominent figures reluctant to enter the region’s sometimes murky political arena.

“Green movements in Central, Eastern and southeastern Europe have become heavily reliant on foreign donors and ‘NGO-ized,’” said Adam Fagan, a professor of European politics at King’s College London. “This arguably depoliticized them and drew them into projects rather than protest.”

The European Green Party (EGP), a federation representing Green parties from over 30 countries, knows it has a problem in the east. “We know we need to focus more on these countries,” said Michal Berg, an EGP committee member responsible for Eastern Europe.

“The success of Greens in the European elections across Europe always helps in terms of issue-raising and the saliency of environmental concern" — Adam Fagan, professor at King’s College London

Berg said the EGP would focus its efforts in the east on transnational issues such as coal as well as on capacity-building, including “developing structures into parties, communications, and how to get new activists and members.”

The only Green party in Eastern Europe that’s managed a sustained success is Hungary’s LMP, which has won parliamentary seats in three consecutive national elections since 2010 and one seat in the European Parliament in 2014 despite a party split in 2013.

It has done so by linking issues like climate change to hot-button subjects like concerns about graft and poor governance. “They were able to combine environmentalism with an anti-corruption stance,” Berg said.

Ungár, one of the party’s MPs, said the party’s poor performance in the most recent European Parliament election was the result of inner-party conflicts, the failure to reach out to working-class voters and an emphasis on changing individual lifestyles rather than on the systemic causes of climate change and environmental degradation.

“[We must] not [frame] green issues as issues for the upper-middle classes, as kind of post-material issues,” he said.

Hungary’s LMP won one seat in the European Parliament in 2014 and has won seats in the national parliament since 2010 | Adam Berry/Getty Images

There are reasons for hope for Greens in the region. Support for the movement is rising among the young, and could continue to grow as today’s youth enters the political arena.

And as the region grows richer — economic growth clocked in at between 3 and 4 percent in many countries in the region last year — environmental issues will likely grow in importance, said Kwiatkowska, the sociology professor in Warsaw.

Finally, there’s the hope that the success in the west — with the Greens at times polling in first place in Germany in recent months — will raise the profile of the movement across the Continent.

“The success of Greens in the European elections across Europe always helps in terms of issue-raising and the saliency of environmental concern,” said Fagan, the King's College professor.

One thing is clear: for Greens in the east, there’s plenty of room to grow.

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