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The current British government crisis offers new opportunities for parties like the Greens. They might have won up to 5 European seats in yesterday’s election according to recent polls, three up from now. Particularly successful is Jean Lambert, candidate in London, who opted for an un-English international campaign, touring the city in an old double-decker bus fuelled by recycled vegetable oil with a team of campaigners from several EU member states and even Canada, and addressing Polish and other migrants in their own languages. If the most positive polls prove right, even German born Ute Michel, a Lewisham councillor, could get elected to the European Parliament. Remco van der Stoep reports. 

Both in the Netherlands and in Ireland Greens had competition from their own circle. In the Dutch elections, held yesterday, two parties claimed the label ‘Green’, approved by the European Green Party. In Dublin, today a former Green MEP ran as an independent candidate against a current Green. In both cases the competition occurred quite late in the campaign and came as a surprise. Read more »

According to Predict 09, a European site summing up national polls, the Greens/EFA would get 42 seats out of 735, if elections had been held around 21May. The result is two seats up from the end of April, and slightly better than the score in 2004, when the Greens/EFA won 43 seats out of 785. 

Roosendaal, Doel - Closing a nuclear plant, building a new goods railway line and turning the Antwerp-Rotterdam harbour area into Europe’s biggest Green Port: Greens from the Dutch-Flemish Schelde Mouth region have started or announced a list of projects that will keep them busy for years, during a joint bus and bicycle tour from Sas van Gent to Baarle Nassau. But their most original claim might be the one Peter Uytdehage, a Green alderman in Roosendaal, proposed: make the railway station of Roosendaal (Nl, some 10 kilometers from the Belgian border) a Belgian station by integrating it into the Belgian Railway Network. Click here for more pictures.

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Sharply falling passenger numbers, economic crisis and climate change make the current airport extension plans for Twente Airport and the Münster-Oberhausen Airport an irresponsible and megalomanic waste of money, said Greens from both regions during a joint campaign cycle ride yesterday. Read their report (in German). Read more »