(CN) — For more than a year, many in Europe have despaired as far-right parties in Italy, Germany and elsewhere have picked up votes and power. But another, albeit smaller, wave is being felt too: a comeback in Northern Europe by the Greens, adherents of an ecological left-wing political movement born out of the radical student protest movements of the 1960s.
In recent elections in Germany’s politically important state of Bavaria and in Belgium and Luxembourg, Green parties saw a surge of votes.
The Greens — known as Die Grünen in Germany — are expected to repeat this success in state elections in Germany’s Hessen region on Sunday. Nationally in Germany, the Greens are polling at about 20 percent, making them the second most popular party after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats.
In mid-October, the Greens doubled their popularity in Bavaria — at the expense, especially, of the imploding Social Democrats, who are at risk of losing their status as Germany’s main left-wing party to the Greens, according to political analysts.
On the same Sunday, which some dubbed “Green Sunday,” the Greens won 50 percent more votes in legislative elections in Luxembourg, confirming themselves as an important party, though they remain much smaller than the center-right Christian Social People’s Party. The Greens are in a coalition government with a liberal and a social-democratic party.
On the same day, Green candidates were big winners in local elections in Belgium, including municipal elections in Brussels, the capital.
“Political ecology has won; we cannot do politics as before,” said Zakia Kattabi, a leader of Belgium’s Ecolo, the green party, after the victory, according to Le Monde newspaper.
The Greens like to see themselves as a party that knows what it stands for: They’re pro-environment, pro-Europe, pro-civil rights, pro-women’s rights, and humanitarian. This makes the party attractive at a time when voters are dissatisfied with the traditional left-right class politics and are looking through a lens defined by identity politics and values, political analysts say.
“The Greens have a more reliable and clearer profile than other parties,” said Reinhard Bütikofer, the co-chair of the European Greens in the European Parliament, in a telephone interview with Courthouse News.
He said the party was benefiting from a new generation of young party members who are pragmatic and optimistic: delivering “radical ideas with a smile on top of that.”
Bütikofer, like others who founded the Greens, got his start in politics with the radical left-wing student movement that flourished after 1968. That movement was Marxist, anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist. The first green parties arose in the 1980s as fears over nuclear annihilation raged.
Today, though, the Greens, in Germany, at least, are of a paler shade of green. They’re not so radical.
“The Greens have become part of the mainstream, in a sense,” said Wolfgang Rüdig, a politics professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. His work has examined the Greens.
This is due, in large measure, to their success. They have wielded power in coalitions both at the federal and state level in Germany, most notably as the smaller coalition partner with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats between 1998 and 2005.
During this period in power, the Greens abandoned their stance on nonviolence and supported Germany’s involvement in the Kosovo conflict and the deployment of German troops in Afghanistan.
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