Letter from Rome: Green growth economy to counter rightist trends in EU. Without losing our souls nor forgetting our essentials

How are European Greens and other “progressive” Parties to counter neoliberal and rightist trends all over the continent? This was the subject of a stimulating debate in Rome with several MEP’s from different countries and parties.

It was coordinated by Monica FRASSONI, the co-president of the Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament. More than seventy local and regional deputies of Italy’s Federazione dei Verdi attended that 23rd June evening. Incidentally, the day after, many of them signed the application form for individual supportership to the European Green Party EGP, to be forwarded to Italy’s Federazione dei Verdi and EGP by Herleen Group’s coordination team member Georg Schedereit. Here’s his report from Rome:

Arnold CASSOLA from Malta, the former EGP General Secretary and now Italian MP, stroke a critical note when he asked: “We are very good at caring for minorities in our society; but how good are we in responding to the anxieties of the majority of citizens regarding security, jobs, pensions, housing, family etc.?

Pierre JONCKHEER from Belgium, Vice President of Greens/EFA Group in the E.P., pondered about the clear shift from center-left to center-right governments almost all over Europe in these first years of the new century. He explained these losses of the left with mounting feelings of insecurity and inequality among their voters. Many of them had lost confidence in the ability of the left, including the Greens, to govern the problems arising from globalisation and world-wide economic competition. Warning that “time is not necessarily on our side”, Jonkheer advocated “a strong alternative answer to the Lisbon strategy about the EU’s economic competitiveness, i.e. “a real project for a Green growth economy based on new ecological technologies”.

Alfonso PECORARO SCANIO, Italy’s Environment Minister and President of the Greens-Federazione dei Verdi, went further to call for “a relaunch communicating Greens as the premier positive driving force for innovation”(climate protection, energy turn-around, sustainable mobility, individual rights for everybody, but also on social matters where “we have been too defensive”) rather than permit others to continue to label Greens as somehow backward-minded and unrealistic nimby-style obstructionists and fundamentalists. To the contrary, Pecoraro Scanio argues, it’s other, bigger, less mobile parties whose “old-style think-big industrialism” is obstructing the necessary reforms towards a lighter, more flexible, more sustainable economy. In this view, it is the Greens who are the real reformers, and even the real liberals, not those neoliberals who increasingly monopolize the terms “reformist” and “liberal” for themselves, labelling instead the Greens as enemies of all reform and innovation, as “extremists of the left”, as part and parcel of Italy’s “sinistra radicale”, or “sinistra massimalista”.

While stressing his absolute loyalty to Prodi’s center-left government of which he is a member, while joking that Greens where “by nature, i.e. cromatically non-red”, while highlighting their unique selling proposition with the necessary self-assurance, Pecoraro Scanio seemed quite conscious of the risk that his two-per-cent-Party might disappear altogether with the incumbent electoral referendum and/or reform. So, he opened all doors to all sort of institutionalized collaboration with former hammer-and-sickle-parties, as long as the special identity of Federazione dei Verdi remains untarnished. Anyway, it would not be the first time that the traditional “smiling sun” symbol of Federazione dei Verdi would have to be contaminated into a multicoloured-peace-and-rainbow-compromise with other minor players in order to secure their continuing presence in Parliament.

This “radical” or “fundamentalist” Italian left played indeed a part in the Green’s Rome event. They were welcomed as guests, and as coalition partners in the Italian government, though not as the only nor the most important ones:

Considering frequent red-Green consensus in the E.P. too, e.g. on subjects such as peace, jobs, rights, migration and mobility, Roberto MUSACCHIO, MEP for Rifondazione Comunista, had to be easily “forgiven” for proudly declaring himself in Rome “still a communist” and at the same time “a European environmentalist”.

Umberto GUIDONI, MEP for Comunisti Italiani, got sympathetic applause from Italian Greens when he stated that “the left will lose not one but many more elections” if it does not “summon the courage to stand up against the concentration of capitals, and against the dogma that there are no other laws than those of the market”.

But privileged partnership with the purest of Communists is not the only option open to Italian Greens. There is at least another one, and it looks promising: Sinistra Democratica (Democratic Left) is the name of the latest banner-holder of democratic socialism in Italy. It was born this Spring out of the discontent among grass-root leftists and unionists, after the leaders of the two biggest coalition parties in Premier Prodi’s government, the Democratici di Sinistra (DS) and the formerly Christian Democratic “Margherita”, decided to merge on Oct.14 into a US-style Democratic Party led by the Mayor of Rome Walter Veltroni and replacing the Prodi government by the year 2011 at the latest.

At the Rome event, the dissident Sinistra Democratica was represented by Pasqualina NAPOLETANO, the Vice President of the Socialist Group (PSE) in the European Parliament and one of the best-respected MEP’s from Italy. It was not by chance that this passionate European chose to quote two eminent “Eastern Europeans”, Alexander Dubcek and Vaclav Havel, to deliver her diagnosis: “This our Europe is losing it’s soul. We are becoming mere functionalists. We are forgetting the essentials.”

Finally, to return to the title of the Rome debate mentioning Greens and others as “progressive” parties, there was applause for a contribution by Italian MP Marco BOATO from the autonomous region of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol. Quoting his charismatic fellow countryman Alex Langer, one of the founding fathers of Italian and European Greens (who committed suicide almost exactly ten years ago), Boato called upon Greens to rethink the term “conservative” re-evaluating its ethymological meaning, as opposed to that of the term “progressive”: while there is much to be said against devoting oneself to progress at any price (to which progress, that of GMO’s, e.g.?), from a Green point of view, there is nothing wrong with trying to preserve whatever really deserves to be preserved, isn’t there?
May this lead us to rethink traditional red-green alliances? To prefer flirting with “conservative”, centrist and/or “liberal” partners to our good old Social Democrat and other even more “old-fashioned” partners? That is another matter, of course, and an intricate at that: Rome, where this point was raised, is by now Europe’s only capital where Greens are governing as partners of a center-left coalition! In all four other European countries where they are presently sharing executive responsability, they do so collaborating with center-right parties!

Rest assured that Greens are not yet prone to genetic modifications.
But like it or not, some chromatic adaptions seem under way.

Georg Schedereit