A decade ago, it appeared that Green parties might fade as quickly as they had bloomed. Now, however, Green parties appear to have become fixtures in the party systems of most Western democracies, and the Greens participate in coalition governments at the national level in Germany, France, Belgium, and Finland, as well as at the regional and local level in most European states. The green challenge has entered a new phase.

The rise of the Greens as a political force was sustained by the unprecedented increase in concern for the environment. Environmentalism has been seen as one enduring manifestation of the “post-materialist” revolution in values that swept the Western world in the wake of increased affluence, participation in higher education, and relative geopolitical stability. However, to see environmentalism solely in this light is to ignore the extent to which, especially for the world’s poor, environmental issues are often fundamentally materialist issues of physical survival, safety, and sustenance. Partly for that reason, the level of environmental concern in a country has not been a particularly good predictor of electoral support for its Green party.

The Greens have polled poorly in such places as southern and eastern Europe, where the understanding of global environmental issues is low, environmental concerns principally take the form of personal complaints about pollution and its impact on health, and environmental organizations are weak. But nor have the Greens have also not been successful in all countries where global environmental awareness is most widespread and environmental movement organizations are especially strong. Environmental awareness may have been a precondition for the rise of Green parties, but the prevailing electoral systems and the conditions of political competition determine whether potential is translated into votes.

Origins

The Greens have been most successful under conditions of proportional representation. By contrast, the majoritarian electoral systems of the United States and Britain have been especially inhospitable to them. Even when the British Greens won almost 15 percent of the national vote in the European election in 1989, they did not win a single seat in parliament. In such systems, a vote for the Greens appears to be a “wasted vote,” or at best a symbolic act of protest against the mainstream alternatives. Such protest voting may have the effect of making major parties more attentive to environmental issues, but a proportional system of representation is a necessity for the advance of Green parties.

In Britain, the introduction of proportional representation for elections to the European Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, and the London Assembly in 1999 and 2000 facilitated the election of the Greens despite their relatively small share of the overall vote. In New Zealand, the introduction of proportional representation in 1999 led to the election of Green members of parliament (MPs) and to the Greens holding the balance of power. In Australia, the Greens’ breakthrough in 2001 came in elections to upper houses elected by proportional representation but not in lower houses where majoritarian systems prevail.

Green parties have seldom grown automatically out of environmental movements. Indeed, if there is a common antecedent to Green parties, it is not so much the broad environmental movement, which traces its origins to the conservation and urban-hygiene movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but the anti-nuclear movements and campaigns of the 1970s. Indeed, in countries such as Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where the environmental movement was already relatively well-institutionalized, environmentalists have often regarded Green parties with indifference or even hostility. The anti-nuclear campaigns, however, did not enjoy the measure of institutional access commonly accorded to environmental groups. Moreover, they were novel and urgent, and they drew on sections of the left that linked environmental objections to nuclear energy with wider security issues. Thus, although Green parties typically emerged against a background of increasingly active environmental concerns, it was more often antinuclear campaigns, conjoined with other left-libertarian concerns of the “new social movements,” which propelled the Greens into electoral politics.

Finding Their Niche

How much the Green parties prospered in their early years depended greatly upon the conditions of political competition they encountered. Green parties faltered from the outset in two of the most environmentally aware and electorally open European countries— Denmark and the Netherlands—principally because other “new left” parties had preceded them there and, having established constituencies, had left little room for newcomers. The belated entry of Greens into the Dutch parliament came not through a surge in support for the original Green party but as a result of the merger of four older “small left” parties under the “Green Left” banner.

The Greens’ greatest successes have come in extraordinary conditions of electoral competition, when Greens have been able to profit from more general discontent. For many years, the Greens’ highest share of a national vote was the 15 percent they polled in Britain in the 1989 elections to the European Parliament. But that result, on the basis of very low turnout in an election to what was widely believed to be a powerless and remote assembly, was achieved because all three mainstream British parties were languishing at a time when media attention had raised the profile of environmental issues. Thus a vote for the Greens was both a “none of the above” protest vote and a gesture of concern for the environment. Similarly, in the first election of Swedish members to the European Parliament in 1995, Greens gained over 17 percent of the vote, principally because they were unreserved opponents of Sweden’s entry into the European Union. The Greens’ best results in elections for a national parliament came in Belgium in 1999 after a succession of political scandals—including, only weeks before the election, one concerning food safety—had so sullied the reputations of the established parties that voters turned with relief to the “clean hands” of parties that had never shared power before.

The Greens were in many countries pioneers in making the environment a central political issue. Once they had put environmental concerns on the agenda and demonstrated that it was not merely a passing fancy but had a relatively stable constituency, other parties, in varying degrees and for varying reasons, also embraced environmentalism, at least rhetorically. The result is that the Greens no longer have the environment to themselves. However, because more mainstream parties do not attend to the environment as convincingly or as consistently, but tend instead to follow the barometer of public opinion, Green parties continue to be most closely identified with and trusted on environmental issues.