Written by Scott Tucker and first published at Popular Resistance
The European Parliament elections saw a major
decline for traditional parties and a rise in support for the Green Party and
populist parties. Greens won 71 seats up from 52 in the previous election. The
Greens won nine of Germany’s ten largest cities. The Greens finished third in
France and second in Finland while tripling their vote in Ireland and doubling
their vote in the United Kingdom.
The Green
Wave seems to have been driven by the climate crisis and the inadequate action
taken by traditional parties. Ska Keller, one of the European Greens’ to lead
candidates for the post of European Commission president, said that any
parliamentary group that wanted Green support would have to “deliver on our
three key principles: climate action, civil liberties and social justice”
Green parties
made stunning gains in the European Elections, due to the strength of many
younger voters, the grass roots insurgency of ecological school strikes and
marches, and the tenacity of Green Party activists.
The older
mainstream parties, both centre-right and social democratic, received a mix of
drubbing demotions and eroding support.
The far right
nationalists also made gains, notably in France and Italy. The far right also
gained less dramatically in Germany. See below for stories describing the
election results.
There are
lessons here not only for European Greens and socialists, but for class
conscious popular resistance in the United States. Any left party that is not
also a party of ecosocialism deserves the dustbin of history. As for the Green
Party of the United States, some harsh home truths are in order.
The Green
Party of the United States has a solid program of peace, economic democracy,
and ecological sanity. Howie Hawkins is a fine representative of the strongly
socialist wing of this party, and deserves support as a presidential candidate.
However, the
Green Party must put its house in order. At the national level, there must be
living wages for working members who have the job of getting the message out to
the public and staffing the bigger campaigns. Donated labor can go only so far,
and in electoral politics amateurism is fatal.
2020 will be
a critical year for the Democratic Party, because a growing sector of young
socialists will be making the effort to break the death grip of the old guard
in the DNC and the DCCC. Some of the reformers will soon be bribed and
recruited as party functionaries. Others will carry on trying to reform the
party from within. And others will finally split to the independent left.
Therefore keep the bridges of communication open.
Already, Joe
Biden stands out as the very incarnation of reflexive and regressive
“centrism.” He offers only one dumb drumbeat response when asked to outline
actual public policies: “Defeat Trump.” Not inspiring and more importantly not
strategic. Especially since career politicians of the Democratic Party labored
mightily, if unwittingly, to put Trump in power. Through their crass careerism,
their phony populism, and above all their corporate loyalties.
The European
Elections also underscore a generational divide in politics. This does not mean
that simply being young guarantees sympathy with either standard social
democracy or with explicit democratic socialism. On the contrary, class loyalties
also count among the young, and one European commenter noted that Macron’s base
is a coalition of “hipsters and the bourgeoisie.”
People in
their fifties and sixties, with a lifetime of vote by rote habits, will not
easily become rebels in the voting booth. But this does not mean breaking
communication with them, only being focused in our attempts to reinvent
democracy from the ground up. Dismissing the whole realm of electoral politics
is a dead end.
We are in the
middle of a long protracted struggle involving dual power. The power of
insurgent and class conscious social movements every day of the year is ours
already. Then we also have the power of using strategic voting, and
demanding electoral reforms such as
abolition of the Electoral College, proportional representation, and instant
run off voting. We cannot wish away the obstacles, but this is a good working
rule: Over, under and around.
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