The one and only climate party

Rome – “Ecology is economy”, that’s the main theme. What Italy’s Federazione dei Verdi is attempting this weekend in Genoa, is an audacious programmatic turn-around. The party’s priorities are now going to be: 1) to stop climate change over the next 15 years and 2) to listen to those who know how (e.g. physics Nobel prize winner Carlo Rubbia and Slow-Food founder Carlo Petrini).

Another of their slogans refers to climate change:”We told you so twenty years ago already”. But Italian Greens can’t get no satisfaction out of noticing that only now almost everybody seems to be “discovering” climate change as THE challenge no.1 of the 21stcentury. Unfortunately, it is the recent Cassandras rather than the early warners that make it to the front pages. But two of the latter are working hard to fight back:

Neither Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, Italy’s Environment Minister and Green Party leader, nor his predecessor MP Grazia Francescato, past-president of the European Green Party (EGP) founded in Rome in 2004, are tempted by the big merger movement now under way to their right (DS+Margherita=”Democratic Party”). Nor do they like the prospect of joining forces with the much more leftish so-called “sinistra radicale” – fragmented as ever, but with hammer and sickle still going strong.

In the Upper House, where the center-left has only the slightest of margins, sig.Prodi’s government with the Greens in it, could come down any time – although this will be unlikely to happen before Autumn 2008.

At last year’s elections, Italian Greens only just qualified for Parliament, with a share of only 2,06 pc. Recent polls showed them even further down, with a number of “rats-leaving-the-sinking-ship”-cases.

But the overwhelming majority of Italian Greens does not seem to see any alternative now to Pecoraro’s and Francescato’s courageous relaunch of the Greens as the one and only climate party.