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PROFILES

The Harder the Fall:The Greens in the Belgian General Elections

of May 2003

It was generally expected that Ecolo and Agalev, who range among the mostsuccessful Green parties, would not perform well in the Belgian generalelections of 18 May 2003. First of all, they had obtained extremely goodresults in the previous elections of June 1999, partly because of aheightened awareness about environmental security and food safety in thefinal weeks of the 1999 campaign [Hooghe and Rihoux, 2000]. Just comingclose to the 1999 results was already seen as a daunting challenge. Second,in 1999, the Greens for the very first time entered a coalition government inBelgium, and although they succeeded in obtaining some policy results, theGreen ministers also received considerable criticism. Just two weeks beforethe elections, one of the Green vice prime ministers, Ms Isabelle Durant(Ecolo), even resigned along with fellow Ecolo Secretary of state OlivierDeleuze because of a dispute about new noise regulations for the Brusselsairport.

Expectations were low, but the final results were even worse than anyGreen could have feared. In the Dutch language area of Belgium, Agalevlost almost two-thirds of its votes, plummeting from 11.4 to 4.0 per cent inthe Dutch constituency. The party failed to gain a single seat in Parliament,bringing an end to 22 years of continuous parliamentary presence at thenational (federal) level. In the French language area, Ecolo lost half of itsvotes, going down from 19.8 to 8.6 per cent of the vote in the Frenchconstituency. Ecolo succeeded in keeping four of its 11 seats in the Chamber(Table 1). The effects of the electoral defeat were disastrous. Socialists andLiberals immediately started negotiations to form a new government, thistime without the Greens. In both parties, the debate about how and in whatform the party could go on (or even survive autonomously, in the case ofAgalev), led to deep divisions.

In some other countries, too, Green parties lost elections after their firstgovernmental participation [Müller-Rommel and Poguntke, 2002].Nowhere, however, was the onslaught so spectacular as it was for theBelgian Greens. In the remainder of this profile, we first ascertain the causesfor this defeat, before venturing into some speculation about what might be

Environmental Politics, Vol.12, No.4, Winter 2003, pp.120–126PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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121THE GREENS IN THE 2003 BELGIAN ELECTIONS

the consequences of this defeat for the future of the Green parties inBelgium.

The 1999–2003 period in government was by no means easy for Agalevand Ecolo [see also Rihoux 2001; Rihoux et al. 2001, 2002, 2003]. It has tobe remembered that at the party conferences being held immediately afterthe 1999 elections, especially among the Ecolo members, there wasconsiderable debate about the decision to take part in theLiberal/Socialist/Green government coalition. It was feared that the seniorcoalition partners (Socialist and Liberals) would weigh too heavy ongovernment policy, thus inhibiting the Green parties from actually having asay in government affairs.

Throughout the legislature, Ecolo remained a rather criticalgovernmental party, especially at the federal level. Its ministers wereconstantly trapped between the constraints and compromises of day-to-daycoalition politics and the very high demands of its activists and grass-rootmembers. As a result, it took a stance of ‘participposition’, that is, acceptingcompromises at some points, but then these compromises would becriticised by the party executive and/or some MPs. This gave Ecolo a quitenegative image in the public … besides irritating both the Liberals and theSocialists. Agalev, on the other hand, proved to be a more loyal coalitionpartner, both in the national government of Belgium, as in the regionalgovernment of Flanders. This even implied that the Agalev ministers finallyapproved a further expansion of the port of Antwerp, threatening the furtherexistence of a small polder village. The issue had a large symbolic impact,given the fact that more than two decades earlier, the green movement in

TABLE 1ELECTION RESULTS FOR THE BELGIAN GREENS, 1978–2003

(LOWER CHAMBER OF PARLIAMENT)

Year Agalev (Dutch) Ecolo (French) Combined% (**) Seats % (**) Seats % Seats

1978 0.1 2 – – 0.1 01981 2.3 2 2.2 2 4.5 41985 3.7 4 2.5 5 6.2 91987 4.5 6 2.6 3 7.1 91991 4.9 7 5.1 10 10.0 171995 4.4 5 4.0 6 8.4 111999 7.0 9 7.4 11 14.4 202003 2.5 0 3.1 4 5.6 4

(*) In 1995, the number of seats in the Chamber was reduced from 212 to 150.(**) Percentages are for the entire country; hence the actual percentages obtained by Agalev

and Ecolo in their respective constituencies are much higher. For example, in 2003, Ecoloobtained 8.6 per cent in the French constituency (i.e. 3.1 per cent of all Belgian votes).

(*) (*) (*)

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Flanders actually came into existence by protesting against the expansion ofthe port of Antwerp.

The ‘annus horribilis’ of the Green coalition partners, however, startedin August 2002. Belgium traditionally is a major arms exporting nation, andequally traditional, this is a very sensitive political issue. As usual inBelgian politics, there is a linguistic spin to this issue: the major weaponfactories are located in the French speaking part of the country, while theDutch speaking parties are most vocal in their protest against the arms trade.Arms exports are only allowed if a licence is granted by the entiregovernment council. This indeed happened when the FN arms companyapplied for a licence for the export of machine guns to Nepal in July 2002.When, a month later the peace movement and some green Members ofParliament discovered that this licence had been granted, they voiced strongprotest, because of the human rights abuses in Nepal where governmenttroops are involved in a long-standing conflict with Communist oppositionforces. Only later on it became clear that Ms Magda Aelvoet, vice primeminister for Agalev, had been present at that specific cabinet meeting, buthad failed to notice the issue, or to voice protest. Following that mistake, MsAelvoet was forced to step down as a minister.

Ecolo ministers were also under fire, especially the transports andmobility minister Isabelle Durant. The first key issue was that of therestructuring of the national railway company, where she faced fierceresistance from both Christian and Socialist trade unions and the Socialistcoalition partners, and hence was not able to force the decisions she waspushing for. The second key issue was that of noise control and flying routesaround airports – particularly the national airport near Brussels. In thespring of 2003, Ms Durant tried to prevent the spreading of the nightlyflying routes above the Brussels region (predominantly francophoneinhabitants), and to maintain the concentration of her ‘Durant’ flying routesabove the northern suburbs of Brussels (less densely populated, butpredominantly Dutch speaking). This lead to a clash between Agalev(defending the mostly Dutch language suburbanites) and Ecolo (defendingthe mostly French-language inhabitants of Brussels), thus harming evenmore the Greens’ image in the public. When PM Verhofstadt cancelled the‘Durant’ route and spread the flying routes again, just weeks before the May2003 elections, Durant felt obliged to step down.

Furthermore, in the months leading to the election campaign, the Greenswere increasingly under fire by the other coalition parties. The Liberals inparticular started to distance themselves from the Green parties. Someleading Liberal politicians claimed that the Greens were too dogmatic,wanted too much state control and regulation, and behaved in anirresponsible way. The Green election campaign did not succeed in creating

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a better image for the Green parties. To some extent, Agalev put up an effortto adapt to ‘modern’ campaigning. In previous election campaigns theGreen parties had tried to gain voters using rather abstract posters andprogram declarations [Hooghe 1992, 1995]. This time the portrait of theAgalev ministers was used abundantly in the campaign, but this againstrengthened the impression that this election really was an evaluation of theGreen participation in government. Ecolo opted for much more abstractposters, though giving more visibility to some key leaders in the press, radioand TV.

It was indeed very difficult for the Green parties to create their ownprofile for these elections. On the one hand, their more radical voters weredisappointed, because of the fact that the Green ministers had agreed withvarious compromises on sensitive Green issues. On the other hand, theywere still being accused of being too dogmatic and too keen on regulatingalmost every aspect of social life. An additional problem is that Agalev andEcolo collaborate very closely, and are often jointly referred to as ‘theGreens’. This is a unique feature in the Belgian party system, that is strictlysegregated along linguistic lines. The close co-operation usually hasbenefits for both Green parties, but in this case it made campaigning ratherdifficult. For example, Flemish public opinion had little appreciation forEcolo minister Isabelle Durant, and to some extent Agalev was also beingheld responsible for the way she ran her department. This was a seriousliability for the Flemish Greens, and it made them more vulnerable thanother parties: no-one would ever hold the Flemish Liberals responsible forsomething a French Liberal minister had done.

The fact that Agalev did much worse than Ecolo can be attributed to thefact that on the Flemish side, Agalev was confronted with a fiercecompetitor: the new Socialist-Flemish National electoral cartel, led by thepopular and easy-going socialist minister Mr Steve Stevaert. Stevaertconducted a very professional and ‘kind’ campaign, promoting what hecalls a ‘generous socialism’. Stevaert succeeded in giving his party an openimage, by inviting the progressive Flemish-Nationalist ‘Spirit’ party into anelectoral cartel. Stevaert even invited Agalev to join the cartel, and againthis was a major charm operation. Election surveys show that a relativelylarge group of young progressive voters shift between Agalev and theSocialists, depending on specific campaign issues. This group was rathertaken in by the way Stevaert proposed a ‘broad progressive coalition’. TheAgalev party leaders, however, distrusted the Socialist overture, andrejected such a cartel.

The Socialist party succeeded in capturing various Green topics, whileselling them in an even more alluring way. Public transport could be a primeexample of this strategy. Stevaert proclaimed himself of being heavily in

123THE GREENS IN THE 2003 BELGIAN ELECTIONS

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favour of public transport, and his formula was easy and attractive: he wantsfree public transport, and in his own town he effectively installed such asystem. The Agalev proposals to promote public transport were seen as lesssympathetic: they wanted higher costs for private car use. The Green partywas not really able to offer a good alternative for the Socialist charmoperation, and the first available evidence shows that Agalev lost its votersmainly toward the renewed Socialist party.

On the francophone side, Ecolo, too, stood in a very unfavourablestrategic position, for at least three key reasons. First, the Christiandemocratic party (PSC) renamed itself into Centre Démocrate Humanisteand took on much more of a ‘post-materialist’ agenda (quality of life, etc).Second, the very popular (and quite centrist) de facto leader of the Liberals,Louis Michel, was able to produce an image of ‘ethical diplomacy’ asminister of Foreign Affairs, making him (and his Liberal party) attractive toeven some Green voters. Third, and more importantly, the new leader of thePS (Socialists), Elio di Rupo, managed to quickly modernise his party andrenew its ideology (taking on some ‘Green’ themes, too), and, even worse,managed to have Ecolo sign a common Convergences de gauche documentcontaining some common ‘progressive’ priorities. This enabled him (andthe PS), symbolically, to appear as the natural leader of the left-wing and‘progressive’ forces, to the detriment of Ecolo. Indeed, there is someevidence that a massive number of Ecolo voters of 1999 voted for the PS in2003.

In the weeks leading to the 18 May elections, opinion polls predicted anegative outcome for the Green parties, and some Green politicians evenpublicly announced that they were quite happy if the party would lose onlya few seats. The election results proved that even the polls were toooptimistic. Especially for Agalev the results were simply disastrous.Everywhere in Flanders, Agalev lost almost two-thirds of their vote, even intheir stronghold, the city of Antwerp. In the rural countryside, Agalev wascompletely swept away, in some areas obtaining no more than 2 percent ofthe vote. Agalev lost all its seats, both in the Chamber as in the Senate.Partly this was due to the fact that for the first time an electoral threshold of5 per cent was established in Belgium. Just half a year earlier, the Greenparties had supported this reform, not imagining that they themselves wouldfall below the electoral threshold. Without the new five per cent rule,Agalev would have kept two seats in the Chamber and one in the Senate.

Ecolo just managed to cling to four seats in the Chamber, hence losingMPs in quite a few constituencies. The fact that the party is still present inthe Chamber and in the Senate allows it to keep a certain level of publicfunding. The electoral defeat left the Greens in disarray, especially Agalevwhich lost almost its entire income. In Belgium, political parties are heavily

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dependent on public funding, distributed according to the number of seatsin Parliament. The fact that Agalev is no longer represented in the nationalParliament, implies that the party lost some 2 million of governmentmoney a year, or 80 per cent of its income. Just two days after the elections,almost everyone at the party secretariat had to be fired. The situation is lessdisastrous for Ecolo, though the French-speaking Greens were quicklyforced to reduce their paid staff by one-third.

But the defeat also had more political consequences. Shortly after theelection, the entire Agalev and Ecolo leadership stepped down, assumingresponsibility for the defeat and hoping that new spokespersons wouldconvey a new and more dynamic image of the party. In June, Agalev electedthe Flemish Member of Parliament Dirk Holemans (38) as its new ‘politicalsecretary’. It was hoped that Holemans would succeed in giving the party ayounger and more moderate image, although there were also fears that thisengineer and philosopher would be ‘too intellectual’ to be considered asattractive for the mass media. At the same party conference, the Agalevmembers decided not to accept Mr Stevaert’s invitation to form a broadcoalition. It was accepted, however, that one of the defeated Greencandidates was co-opted as a Senator for the Socialist Party, anunprecedented step in Belgian political history. In a second resolution, thedoor was kept ajar for future talks with the Socialist-Spirit cartel.

In July, Ecolo also elected its new three-member executive committee.During the short but fierce internal electoral campaign, two teams stood incompetition: a more ‘moderate-generalist’ one led by 35-year old relative newcomer Jean-Michel Javaux, and a more ‘fundamentalist–environmentalist’ one led by founding father Paul Lannoye. Eventually, theJavaux team won quite easily (62 per cent). It intends to function in a ‘2 +1’format, that is, with two de facto party co-presidents (one male, one female),the third executive member performing more an internal managementfunction. Hence this means a significant move further away from collectiveleadership, in an attempt to re-gain more internal coherence as well as aclearer public image.

In June 2004, regional elections will be held in Belgium, and they willdecide on the future viability of Green parties in the country. The partiesthemselves hope that a number of voters will return to Agalev and Ecolo.Now that they have seen that Agalev is on the brink of disappearing, it ishoped that they will realise that a vote for the Greens is of strategicimportance. A weak point for the Green parties is that opinion polls indicatethat young voters are no longer attracted to the Greens. In both parts of thecountry, young voters are charmed by the modernised Socialist parties orthe dynamic appeal of the Liberals. This is a fundamental change with thesituation just little more than a decade ago, when the Greens obtained their

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126 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

best scores among young voters. A likely explanation for this pattern couldbe that the Green voters have simply matured along with their party.

Just a year ago, the Belgian Green parties still were seen as the mostsuccessful Green formation in Europe [Müller-Rommel and Poguntke,2002]. After the May 2003 elections, the picture suddenly looks muchbleaker, and especially Agalev is now fighting for its survival as anautonomous party. The June 2004 regional elections will be decisive in thisrespect.

M A R C H O O G H E

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

B E N O Î T R I H O U X

Université catholique de Louvain

Hooghe, Marc (1992), ‘The Green Parties in the Belgian General Elections of 24 November1991’, Environmental Politics, 1(2), 287–92.

Hooghe, Marc (1995), ‘The Greens in the Belgian Elections of 21 May 1995’, EnvironmentalPolitics, 4(4), 253–57.

Hooghe, Marc and Benoît Riboux (2000), ‘The Green Breakthrough in the Belgian GeneralElections of June 1999’, Environmental Politics, 9(3), 129–36.

Ferdinand Müller-Rommel and Thomas Poguntke (eds., 2002), ‘Green Parties in NationalGovernments, Special Issue’, Environmental Politics, 11(1).

Rihoux, Benoît (2001), ‘Belgium’, European Journal of Political Research, 38(3–4), 338–47.Rihoux, Benoît, Patrick Dumont and Régis Dandoy (2001), ‘Belgium’, European Journal of

Political Research, 40(3–4), 254–62.Rihoux, Benoît, Patrick Dumont, Lieven De Winter and Régis Dandoy (2002), ‘Belgium’

European Journal of Political Research, 41(7–8), 915–26.Rihoux, Benoît, Patrick Dumont, Lieven De Winter and Régis Dandoy (2003, forthcoming),

‘Belgium’, European Journal of Political Research.

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The Re-Emergence of the Greek Greens

The history of Greek political ecology is a sad one. Forced to operate in apolitical arena which was (until the mid 1990s) highly polarised between theSocialists and the Conservatives, the Greek Greens also had to face aninsurmountable barrier in their efforts to achieve parliamentaryrepresentation: an electoral system which clearly discriminated againstminor parties coupled with a 3 per cent threshold. Nevertheless, when thesehurdles were temporarily removed in the late 1980s – as a last minute stuntby the Socialists to liquidate their opponents’ electoral win – the GreekFederation of Ecologists Alternatives (FEA) managed to elect a single MP,albeit securing less than 0.8 per cent of the vote. What was, then, heraldedas the dawn of ‘new politics’ was to be reduced to tatters in less than threeyears, mainly as a result of personal grievances and ‘primordial’factionalism [Karamichas and Botetzagias, 2003].

Following FEA’s collapse (in early 1992), political ecology waspronounced dead in Greece. The follow-up groupings and/or parties severalveteran activists had created during the 1990s, proved both moribund andunsuccessful. In autumn 1993, the ‘New Ecological Initiative’ supportedSYN (one of the major Greek left parties) in that year’s parliamentaryelection and shortly after fell into oblivion. Early 1994 witnessed thecreation of ‘Political Ecology’ which competed in the same year’s EuropeanParliament election securing a dismal 0.26 per cent of the vote.

The one which lasted longest was Prassini Politiki (Green Politics).Created in early 1999, Prassini Politiki took the unprecedented decision notto compete in a forthcoming election. This produced an early walk-out ofsome prominent activists yet it saved the party from an, all too familiar,post-electoral meltdown. Instead, Prassini Politiki clung on, managing toestablish itself as a member of the European Greens. Nevertheless, itsinward looking stance soon demonstrated its limitations:1 the party’smembership never exceeded the ‘one hundred’ threshold while it wassimply ignored by the media. The strategic folly and the self-defeatingcharacter of such an approach became painfully apparent during thecampaign against the revision of (the Greek Constitution’s) Article 24 (mid-2000). This was the case where a grand alliance of ENGOs, professionalbodies, political ecologists, citizen initiatives and green-minded Judges ofthe Supreme Court, was summarily routed by an administration determinedto water down the constitutional protection Article 24 had hitherto offeredto the Greek natural environment.

Environmental Politics, Vol.12, No.4, Winter 2003, pp.127–132PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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This resounding failure helped to disperse any romantic ideas of‘opposing the government at the societal level’ (as the Greek Greens haddreamed), while the campaign itself offered the opportunity for politicalecologists and environmentalists to come together after almost a decade.This rapprochement cumulated into the creation of Oikologiko Forum(Ecological Forum, OF) in Spring 2002, aiming to act as a forum ofdiscussion and debating for political ecology issues. Less than a year latter(December 2002) Prassini Politiki and many activists from the O.F., hosteda meeting for the ‘regrouping of political ecology in Greece’, which wasanother way of saying that the Greek Greens were about to create a newparty set for electoral participation.

The delegates did decide to create such a party, labelled OikologiPrassini (Ecologists Greens, EG),2 and scheduled its Constituent Congressfor March 2003. Yet the Constituent Congress never occurred: the partydecided to keep a low profile and organise instead a ‘Conference onGuiding Principles and Internal Organisation’ in mid-May, 2003.

The Characteristics of EG

The supreme body of the party is the ‘General Assembly’, convened yearlyto debate on and decide the party’s policies. The party is to be run by aPanhellenic Council of 20 members (12 get elected directly by theAssembly while the remaining eight get elected in the respective Greekdistricts). The daily management is left to the Executive Secretariat, a six-person body originating from the Council. A number of issues (such as theParty’s stance on Culture) were not addressed by the Conference and weredelegated to Special Conventions, to occur in early autumn 2003.

The Conference attendees themselves clustered into two quite differentgroups. The ‘old guard’, consisting of veteran activists of FEA, with a clearidea of how the party should look and what it should aim to achieve. Theyseem to have studied the lessons of the past and to have moved away fromthe romanticism of their youth: thus, the new party has set procedures forexpelling those ‘violating the Party’s Charter’; the frantic rotation principlehas been abandoned; the Environmental NGOs are now perceived aspartners and not as foes while the Party stands beyond the traditionalright–left (political) dichotomy. Last but not least, the party had alsoabandoned any ideas of positive discrimination in favour of femalerepresentatives.

This is not to say that the now ‘reformed’ old cadres are going to havean easy time carrying the proselytisers along. The most interestingincidence of the two-day Conference was the voting down of a proposal, putforward by three of the best-known and leading members, endorsing the

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Party’s participation in the 2004 European Parliament election. As a matterof fact, the attendees even rejected a reformulation expressing the ‘wish’ forsuch an endeavour and the whole issue was delegated to an internalReferendum set for June 2003.3

The new party is now faced with two major challenges which willdetermine its electoral and political fortunes: first, the developments withinone of the two major Greek left parties, SYN (Coalition of the Left and theProgress), and, second, its relations with the European Greens.

The Ecologists Greens and the Left

The SYN have long flirted with the ecologists. Even back in the nineteeneighties, one of the major tendencies within the Ecologist Federation wasthe ‘Progressive Left’, a group of dissident SYN members. In parallel, andpossibly in reaction, to the developments in the ‘pure’ Green camp, theseold activists – along with the newcomers – have being active at the‘greening’ of SYN. Their efforts bore fruit in early 2001, when SYN’sCentral Political Council endorsed a proposal advocating the re-naming ofthe party from ‘Coalition of the Left and the Progress’ into ‘Coalition of theLeft and the Ecology’. They have also managed to establish themselves asan institutionalised ‘tendency’ within SYN, the so-called ‘Green Left’(early 2003) while during SYN’s ‘Conference on Guiding Principles’ (endof May 2003), they succeeded in changing the party’s name into ‘Coalitionof the Left, the Social Movements and the Ecology’.4

This development certainly poses great problems to EG. They now haveto make explicitly clear that they are not a ‘left-green’ party – as opposed toa ‘green-left’ SYN, a distinction quite superficial to the inexperienced – butrather a ‘pure’ green party. This is a difficult task indeed, not least becausevery few people in Greece have any idea of what ‘green’ stands for. Rather,the major problem is that EG is a ‘left-green’ party. To that extent, a studyconcerning the beliefs of Green parties’ membership5 has shown that theleading cadres of the Greek Greens in mid-2002 were of a left disposition6

while also perceiving their ‘green’ party to be a leftist one.7

This leads to a situation where while the EG’s manifesto and guidingprinciples are of a pure leftist character, the ‘L’-word itself is taboo.Glancing through EG’s latest publications one would have a hard timefinding any reference to the left other than ‘the Left does not offer a way outof the present [regrettable] situation’, while all the party’s documents werethoroughly ‘cleaned’: thus the thesis that ‘Our Ecology is [of the] Left’ hasbeen dropped.

As the previous analysis shows, despite their deeper instincts, the GreekGreens were forced to drop any leftist reference which would seem to

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equate them with the ‘greening’ SYN. Unfortunately for them, there is noway out of the conundrum: it is not that their support historically originatesfrom the same social strata as SYN’s [Botetzagias, 2001a: 203–6], but mostimportantly that SYN is better placed in securing for itself the moderate endof the green/left spectrum. Thus EG are left with but three options: (a) toposition themselves to SYN’s right; (b) to position themselves to SYN’sleft; or (c) to elevate themselves over the dichotomy between right and left. The first option is not seriously defended by anyone since it would lead toan environmentalists’ party without any clear activist’s base. Concerningthe second option, I have already discussed the problems arising fromopting for a ‘left-green’ party. Thus it seems that the last option is the onlyone really available.

The Ecologists Greens and the European Greens

From the outset, Greek political ecology was obsessed with the EuropeanGreens. One plausible explanation could be the absence of any indigenoustheorists and/or successes upon which the Greek ecological movement couldpride itself. Thus, it was prompted to look westwards for inspiration andrecognition. It should then come as no surprise that the Ecologists Greensfeature proudly in their banner the subtitle ‘Member of the Federation of theEuropean Greens’. A fortiori, on all the issues the latest Conference could notreach an agreement, it was (tacitly?) accepted that the party would use andrely upon the European Green’s Federation theses for the interim period.

This over-reliance could well have a boomerang effect. A preliminaryinvestigation of the relevant discussion boards on Indymedia Athens andThessaloniki,8 which the wired Greek left-libertarians increasingly use, hasrevealed that following the NATO involvement in Yugoslavia – which –according to the Indymedia’s posted messages – the German ‘green’Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, either failed to halt or condoned, the‘European Greens’ – and especially the Germans – are perceived as ‘pettybourgeois politicians’, who betrayed their past struggles and rhetoric. Someof the leading EG activists tried – to no avail – to draw a line between theEuropean Federation and die Grunen, Fischer/Cohn Bendit and the rest. Itis then probable that EG’s over-stressing of their European links is going toalienate their left-libertarian audience, the very same niche that supportedthem back in the 1980s. This fact does not escape the leading cadres of theEG yet does not trouble them much: judging from their trajectory so far, EGare not FEA. The new party is a more ‘Realo’ one – or at least tries to appearas such. Thus we could be witnessing the party’s strategic decision todistance itself from its old radical following, while trying to approach themiddle ground.

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What has the future in store?

We are witnessing the emergence of a new, left green, party thatnevertheless cannot afford to accept its very nature. Its emphasis on‘Ecology beyond Right and Left’ is going to alienate the more radicalindividuals and lead to a party marked by the uneasy cohabitation of ‘leftist’greens and rather apolitical environmentalists/local activists. A turningpoint in the party’s fortunes will be the national and European parliamentelections set for 2004. While it is unlikely that EG will compete in theformer (the lack of human and material resources should be a majorconcern), they will very probably participate in the latter, hoping that theright combination of campaign stunts, resource mobilisation, and voterapathy would allow them to elect one MEP. If on the other hand, they sufferan inglorious defeat – and if the history of the Greek political ecology hasto offer us any lessons – the frictions between ‘apoliticals’ and leftist Greenswould come to the fore leading to the walkout of the ‘apolitical’ wing andgiving birth to a new, small yet radical, ‘left-green’ party.

I O S I F B O T E T Z A G I A S

Keele University

NOTES

1. While interviewing some of the main cadres in late 2000, I was told that it was the Party’sstrategic decision not to compete in elections, focusing instead on the societal level.

2. Which absorbed Prassini Politiki but not the Ecological Forum. The latter had since thenbecame inactive.

3. The reason behind the rejection was the widespread feeling that the area was notstrong/mature enough for such an adventure coupled with a disdain for parliamentarypolitics.

4. This surprising storming of a major left bastion is better understood in the context of a(literally) last-minute proposal by the Central Political Council – suggesting a change inSYN’s title and the firm support it received by SYN’s popular leader, N. Konstandopoulos.The media were quick in reporting the presumed-certain change thus a rebuke by theConference would have been perceived as a personal defeat for the party’s President.Although many delegates expressed their disproval both of the title and the procedurefollowed, the majority voted, willy-nilly, in favour of the change. Due to poor tactics, thiswas a battle won harder than anyone would have imagined and which imposed great strainson SYN’s fragile internal balance of power. As a final note the ‘Social Movements’ clausewas inserted only hours before the beginning of the conference – the initial proposal referredonly to the Left and the Ecology – as, it is widely believed, an attempt to disperse any fearsthat this re-naming is but the first step towards a rapprochement with the Greek Socialists(PASOK), similar to the German case.

5. The study is co-ordinated by Dr Wolfgang Ruedig, University of Strathclyde.(http://www.strath.ac.uk/Departments/Government/rudig/EGPM/EGPM.htm). The Greekquestionnaire [Botetzagias, 2002, unpublished data] was sent (Summer 2002) to a handful ofleading figures of – the then – Prassini Politiki (ten individuals), all of them currentlyparticipating in EG. A second questionnaire is currently under distribution to the registeredmembers of EG.

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6. Self-placement mean score of 3.23 on a scale between zero (left) to ten (right). 7. Thus Prassini Politiki scored a mean of 3.03 to the above mentioned scale (as compared to

3.94 for SYN and 3.43 for the – Stalinist-Communist Party of Greece).8. Independent Media Services, operating as a non-aligned source of information.

REFERENCES

Botetzagias, I. (2001a), ‘The Environmental Movement in Greece, 1973 to the Present; anIllusory Social Movement in a Semi-peripheral Country’, unpublished PhD thesis,Department of Politics, Keele University.

Karamichas J. and I. Botetzagias (2003, forthcoming), ‘Green Party Factionalism. The case of theEcologists-Alternatives of Greece’, South European Society and Politics, Vol.8 No.3.

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