Hi, we’re the new neighbours. We brought tapenade.
The most read article in the sidebar of the Swedish socialist newspaper Flamman is ‘Are the Greens a bourgeois party’. The short answer is no, but the eagerness with which Sweden’s socialists are apparently clicking on the piece in question time and time again suggest they are no closer to accepting the young upstart in the red crowd.
Across an ocean and much further south, the Labour party in Brighton are clicking too, looking for their own smoking gun. Somewhere, they believe, is proof that Green politic is a charade. In the simple language where left means red and red means Labour, green is a colour to be suspicious of as much as yellow or blue. The target of their ire is Caroline Lucas, a popular and principled local MP in a seat that Labour feel should be theirs.
Labour are expending increasingly large resources countering what the Greens themselves have characterised as the ‘green surge’, typified by the clenched green fist adopted by those members of the party with a well-thumbed copy of Das Kapital in their schooldesk. Lessons from Sweden and elsewhere though show that Labour would be better off saving their money for UKIP.
In the mid 1990s, the Swedish Green Party began to change the balance of power in parliament so that Social Democrat governments were forced to rely on Green votes to govern effectively. From 1998 to 2006 the Social Democrats operated a system of confidence and supply in key areas, though not always happily. Similarly in 1998 the German Social Democrats were able to win a full majority with the help of The Greens/Alliance 90, causing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to say that they had begun a ‘Project Red-Green’, permanently positioning The Greens as the natural coalition partner for federal government if the maths allowed. Previous to these cooperation agreements there had been some fairly intense anti-Green activity in both countries, focusing largely on how the ecologically minded upstarts were little better than middle class do-gooders and economic illiterates.
In both countries, the Green parties have continued to grow and an understanding of the relative strengths of each group and mutual interest has developed. In Sweden the Greens entered government as a full coalition partner for the first time this year, albeit in a minority administration. The real lesson to be taken is that nowhere in Europe has a Green party grown and been successfully stamped out by the existing left and centre-left parties. They may not wear the red ties and grey suits of the People’s Party, but if Labour are interested in more than being the biggest party in opposition their war on the Greens looks very short-sighted indeed.