The Greens may only have come fourth in Sunday’s European Parliament elections, but no one in Brussels was in any doubt about the scale of their victory.
After years of operating from the periphery of the EU’s corridors of power, the parliament’s Green group has secured enough seats to make itself a near-essential partner in any functioning coalition.
Bolstered by an exceptional result in Germany, where only Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats won more seats, and a strong third-placed finish in France, the Greens increased the number of their MEPs by almost 40 per cent at the same time as the parliament’s main centre-left and centre-right groups shrunk.
The upshot, parliament chiefs acknowledge, is that its 69 MEPs are crucial to forming a pro-EU alliance in the assembly that can shape and implement the agenda of the next European Commission.
While, mathematically, the parliament’s centre-right, centre-left and liberal groups could try to work together without the Greens, the majority would be fragile, and highly vulnerable to internal splits.
Ska Keller, the Green group’s co-president, said the result was “a mandate for change in the European Union” and that the Greens now had “a great responsibility” to “put that trust into action”.
The Greens’ opportunity to shape the agenda stems from the rules that govern the appointment of the next president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm. The new president must secure the assembly’s approval before taking office. Parliament also has a binding say over almost all areas of EU policymaking.
Having had little presence over the years in the commission’s political college, or around the summit table of EU leaders, the Greens have sought to punch above their weight in the parliament.
The group’s limited size has meant that it has focused on securing targeted victories on draft laws, either by striking a hard bargain for its support when the assembly was evenly split, or by successfully harnessing the weight of public opinion.
It was a strategy that secured notable victories, and not just in the field of climate change. Bank lobbyists grudgingly acknowledge the skill with which the Greens rode a wave of public fury after the 2008 financial crisis to secure an EU-wide cap on banker bonuses, overriding objections from the UK government.
But for Philippe Lamberts, the Greens’ other co-president, the group is now well positioned to enjoy greater influence. “We have been in a transactional mode so far,” he told the Financial Times. “Now we have the chance to be in a more stable relationship [with other political groups]. We want to be closer to the source of the legislation.”
Whether that relationship comes about depends on other groups, and prospective candidates for the commission presidency, bowing to its demands.
Green policy priorities include more climate taxes and a sea-change in the bloc’s approach to negotiating trade deals — one that would prioritise the alignment of environmental and labour standards over market opening.
It will also depend on how the group handles reservations about coalition deals among its most prominent members. During the election campaign, Yannick Jadot, the leader of the French Greens, publicly ruled out an alliance with the centre-right European People’s party, but Sunday’s results mean it is difficult to see how a majority could be formed without the EPP.
Mr Lamberts said that a key priority for the Greens in any arrangement would be that the group secures “fundamental”, bankable concessions on policy. He said the party was determined to avoid a repeat of past situations where political leaders “belly-danced for our support, then forgot who we were”.
Influential Greens
Ska Keller
Co-president of the Greens in the European Parliament, Ska Keller rose to prominence as one of the party’s two candidates to become commission president in 2014. A German climate campaigner and former spokeswoman for the Federation of Young European Greens, Ms Keller entered the EU parliament at the age of 27 in 2009, and forged a reputation as a strong debater. In the 2014 campaign, she went head to head with EU veterans such as Jean-Claude Juncker and Germany’s Martin Schulz, warning that “all of a generation is being lost” to the economic crisis. She has been one of the strongest voices in parliament behind calls for a humanitarian policy to save refugees from drowning in the Mediterranean and for an overhaul of EU trade deals.
Philippe Lamberts
The 56-year-old Belgian made his reputation as a skilled operator in the European Parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee, where he fought to shape the EU’s response to the 2008 financial crisis. Exploiting splits between national governments and the popular demand for the banks to be held to account, he successfully pushed for bonus caps and greater tax transparency in the financial sector. He became co-president of the parliament’s “Greens/European Free Alliance” group in 2014.
Yannick Jadot
The leader of Europe Ecologie-Les Verts vowed in the wake of Sunday’s election to build a broad “credible” movement to take on Emmanuel Macron, claiming that the “old world” of politics was at an end. EE-LV’s 13 per cent tally turns the page on a bleak period for the party, whose nadir probably came with Mr Jadot’s decision to drop out of the 2017 presidential election in favour of socialist candidate Benoît Hamon, who suffered a crushing defeat. Mr Jadot took the opposite approach in the EU election, resisting overtures from the left for a joint list of candidates. An MEP since 2009, Mr Jadot has emphasised the clear blue political water between himself and Mr Macron, who has had some success in attracting prominent Green politicians into his movement, notably Pascal Canfin, a former Green MEP, who ran on the president’s list in Sunday’s election.
Robert Habeck
The co-leader of the German Greens has played an outsized role in the party’s recent surge in Germany — and by extension the movement’s broader success in Europe. The former novelist is a ubiquitous presence on television, and polls regularly identify him as one of the most popular politicians in the country. In his previous role as Green leader in the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein, Mr Habeck struck a landmark coalition deal with the conservative Christian Democrats and the pro-business Free Democrats — a move that confirmed the Greens’ ambitions to shift into the political centre. The 49-year-old told a news conference on Monday that the European result had “exceeded all our expectations . . . We have moved into the centre of the political debate”.
Additional reporting by Tobias Buck
