A Party of People

By Lin Tabak

If we want the European Green Party to get strong enough to live up to our European ambitions, we must give it direct links to grassroots Greens. The individual supportership however, though an excellent tool for this purpose, is far from fully used. To change that, some hurdles have to be removed. On the parties’ side there are the differences in views of how the internal democracy should be organised,  and  the parties’ still limited perception of the EGP’s role. To make more of the supportership, the EGP  parties should furthermore allow for experiments – like admitting non-Greens – and give the Supporters’ Network a place in its structures where the grassroots’ voice can be heard.

Some assumptions

Let’s say that a political party is a turntable between society and politicians, a body that translates ideas and interests of people into coherent visions and proposals for laws. Let’s also assume that this party is a democratic body, in which individual members are the bearers of a shared vision, pick up signals from society and create support for them, in short: are the parties’ ears, eyes and voices. What does that mean for a transnational federation of parties like the EGP?

Preparing the Ground

I would say that the EGP, if it wants to develop into more than a federation, if it wants to become a real party with a vision of its own, it needs the engagement of individuals just as much as any other party does.  And the EGP has these ambitions; just look at the policy documents it has produced and you see that it already is moving in that direction since 2006.

If the EGP is not a real party yet, a lack of individual commitment is not the only cause. It isn’t even the main cause, I think. The EGP’s main handicap is that, unlike a national or regional party, it lacks a political platform of its own: the European Union still is a congregation of nation-states whose members of Parliament are elected in a national context and which doesn’t have a ‘people’, a civil society, as its democratic base. If Europe’s Green parties want this European Union to become a grown-up democracy – which they do – they should help to prepare the ground by helping to create the civil society that provides that provides the necessary support. In the European Green Party they have an excellent instrument…. provided that party becomes a ‘party of people’.

Linking Levels

One could argue that individuals already are connected to the EGP through their parties and party delegates. That link, however, is weak. It is maintained by a very small number of people per party.  It doesn’t produce the transnational connections needed to boost a European Green civil society, or the direct connection between party and people needed to create a common spirit. It doesn’t produce the commitment from the grassroots level needed to give the common visions political weight, nor the grassroots enthusiasm that would give those visions a permanent voice on the street. The main reason: the EGPs member parties’ main concerns are on the national and sub-national level. Which makes sense, given the dynamics of the political systems they operate in.

But individuals are connected to the EGP in a second way: through the individual supportership that was created in 2004 – a membership with participation right but without vote – and the Supporters Network, a grassroots’ and supporters’ initiative that has been integrated in the structures in 2009.  The possibilities of supportership and network, however, have been far from fully used: together the EGP parties have about a quarter million of members, but only some 1200 have registered as supporters. That’s the bad news.

Now the good news: those 1200 come from about 4 or 5 parties that have opened the supportership to their members. And about a thousand come from the Dutch Green party GroenLinks. Meaning that, if given the opportunity, people are interested. So if all parties allow their members to register and promote it a bit more, far higher numbers are possible.

Two Hurdles

If one wants to boost individual participation – which the Future working group of the EGP has said it does – one has to understand the still feeble response from parties. I see two main reasons, which, I think, need to be addressed separately:

1. The difference in views of how a democratic party should function
2. The parties’ perception of the EGP.

1. Different Democracies

Formally party democracy is not an issue, because the EGP supporters don’t have the right to vote. (And I think that should not be changed at the moment, because the EGP member parties are way too different and I don’t particularly look forward to the endless hair-splitting about the allocation of voting rights.) But for many parties it still is connected, either because they see the supportership as a step towards proper membership, because the role they see for individuals is inseparable from their vision of democracy.  So the issue should be addressed.

When discussing the role of the individual within a party within a European context, you soon discover that quite distinct models exist: the party mainly run by professionals and people elected in councils and parliaments (Austria), where individuals occasionally give a hand during campaigns; the ‘flat’ party (like GroenLinks) in which individuals join directly at the national level and have the right to vote and be active on whichever level they choose; the bottom-up party in which you join at the local level, to which you always remain accountable, before you move to a larger geographical scale (Bündis 90/Die Grünen); and parties that partly function along the lines of semi-official sensibilities or wings (Les Verts, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen).

I don’t want to judge those models right now. Each has its own logic, linked to national circumstances. Each has its advantages. Allowing each member a say on all levels makes the threshold for participation very low, but it is only practical in countries that are small enough to allow each member to travel from one side to the other to vote in congresses in one day. Putting the local level at the core ensures that decisions are made bottom-up. The ‘sensibility’ system prevents one faction from monopolising the power. And the ‘professional’ model was designed to prevent hostile takeovers that still are fairly common in some countries in former Eastern Europe.

None of those models, however, can simply be transposed to the European level. If you’d have to climb the whole geographical ladder to participate in European politics, the EU would de facto be limited to the happy few – which is pretty much the status quo we want to change. A flat structure like in the Netherlands would be impossible to handle on a European scale; how could you assure all members equal access to congresses, how would they all fit?  The sensibility system might easily lead to endless internal fights that sap the little energy the EGP currently has – as the French example has shown.

And neither of those systems will spontaneously produce transnational connections, as long as European elections are fought nationally. So if you want to boost European and cross border participation, if you want to bring new momentum, you should, for a start, make the threshold for participation very low.

2. Limited perception

The second hurdle hasn’t only to do with supportership, but with the EGP as a whole. In most parties the EGP still plays a marginal role; they pay their contribution, they send delegates to councils twice a year, and discuss resolutions. Some smaller ones get support. And some parties, mostly the stronger ones, send specialists to networks and working groups. But hardly any party sees the EGP as something that affects everyday party life. In such conditions EGP supportership will, for the party board, either just be point 98 on the priority list, as an English member of the Network once said, or seen as a burden too many, maybe even a possible threat: what if your members give their precious energy to someone else? Promoting that supportership in some parties almost gives you the feeling that you are fishing in someone else’s pond.

The answer is not an easy one, and it should be given by the EGP, not just the Supporters’ Network. Only when those who believe in common action, persuade their parties that they get back more than they receive, those parties will go along with a more ambitious European project.

But the Supporters’ Network can help that process in several ways:

• By making the administration of the Supportership dead easy (already started)
• By showing, through concrete projects, that linking individuals and groups across borders doesn’t go at the cost of the national party but reïnforces it.

Opportunities

a. Flexibility and experiment

Those are the keywords, I think. The EU is a supra national democracy in the make, which offers political parties a unique opportunity to try out new forms of participation, ranging from a one time action with a precise goal to traditional party life and creating internet communities, from a training ground for students to a borderless battle ground for the greying Generation ’68. And with the individual supportership the EGP has, I believe, created a unique tool for that participation, because the supportership is not (yet?) charged with the burden of voting rights, but does have many possibilities to nourish the further development of the European Green project.

b. Focus

That tool should, however, not be used ‘at random’. If the supportership wants to live up to the expectations, if it wants to be more than a congregation of Euro-believers circling round MEPs and frequenting EGP councils, it must tissue cross border webs on all levels where it makes sense, and link European action to local society. How can we ensure that these things will happen? We cannot; you can hardly force people to go out on the streets and march for the Green European cause, link European policy to local action or exchange practices and views across borders just because they have paid 12 Euros to the EGP. But you can encourage them. And that’s where the Supporters’ Network comes in: it has made these forms of reaching out to its core business. And the EGP can be an accomplice to this mission, because Network is accountable to the EGP council for each Euro of supporters’ money it receives.

c. Opening up

Formally the EGP Supportership is open to all who agree to the European Green principles. But for all sorts of reasons the party in their country of residence has to agree. Some parties don’t, or even have problems with other parties deciding to open the door. I hope they’ll reconsider their position. As long as the supportership is on a non-voting base, it should be allowed as much freedom as possible to find out how it can be used best. Allowing non-party members to register can, I think, have great possibilities. It might appeal to a whole new category of activists: students, professionals, workers, internauts and others who don’t identify with one specific country because they move from one place to another, live in several countries at the time or prefer cross border actions to local ones.

Through those actions they also get in touch with national and local Greens, because that is how the Network operates, so the national parties are likely to profit as well.

Sure there should be safeguards – a club must have the right to throw out a member who misbehaves. But supporters having no real rights I’d start with using those safeguards a posteriori, not as preconditions.

d. A Voice

At the moment the Supporters’ Network operates quite independently from the EGP: the team members nominated by the EGP Board watch over possible synergy and act as advisors rather than limiting the Networks’ acting space. And the Network offers party delegates fringe meetings during councils, which allows for an exchange of practices and views. This acting space is a good thing, I believe, because it allows for experiment.

Yet some more interaction would do no harm, because the network is part and parcel of the EGP – and its actions should be beneficial to it.  And the Network represents a dimension that isn’t represented now: it is not national/regional party based like the party delegates, nor sectoral, like FYEG and ENGS, but transnational and, we hope, a forebode of a new development. I can think of two possibilities:

• A ‘quality’ seat on the board, as an observer or advisor.  This way the network can get involved in EGP activities more frequently, whenever that makes sense
• One or two delegates in the council. Knowing they have a voice in the decision-making body can make the network more attractive for supporters: it enables them to make proposals and to influence the development of the EGP.

Such a position, however, should be justified, I think. Once the supporters come from a considerable amount of parties – 8 or should be feasible – and at least half of those would have a considerable number of supporters – let’s say 25 – the network can be considered as reflecting the diversity of the EGP. Such a threshold would have an additional advantage: it would be an incentive to expand the supportership double quick.