Spain: With a little help from our friends

In the Basque hamlet of Beire, where the Spanish Greens interrupted their summer holidays to build the fundaments of a unified reappearance on the national stage, recent developments in France served as a shining example. The party-in-the make, still called Coordinadora Verde, has one handicap: there’s no party structure to build from like in France. But if the initiators have their way, that handicap can also become an advance.

They had tempted the devil. Annette Muggenthaler, who had taken care of the practicalities, had chosen a family run alberque, inn, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, rather than a standard conference facility in a city centre, to support the crisis-hit rural economy. She’d picked the end of July, a period even the most hard-core political addicts use to spend on the beech. And the only capital she and her fellow-organisers could bank on was a couple of handfuls of volunteers.

Spanish political ecology has a history of almost thirty years. But, the Iniciativa para Cataluña Verds excepted, it never got beyond the odd European or national seat – which was lost as fast as it had been won. The main reason: a pathological rivalry between factions and political players that, rather than cooperating for the common cause, put all energy into fighting each other. In recent years the decomposition tendency got new fuel from the increasing tendency towards regional autonomy.

Elephant combats

Information desk

In 2008 however, small group of grassroots activists decided they’d had enough. Frustrated by the growing mismatch between the ecological challenges and the Green acting force, they met in the Basque border town of Hondarribia, and launched a call for unification that would put an end what they called the ‘elephant combats’.

At first, no leaders paid attention. But in January 2009, at a meeting in snow-covered Segovia, they were over 60, and so determined that the Green establishment got nervous and did all they could to depict the Hondarribia group as dangerous and subversive. In Beire however, they were well over 200 and each and every Green with political ambitions did their best to be part of the new force. And what is more: an amazing number of protagonists from Greenpeace, consumers’ organisations, universities, solidarity and environment groups, and even Green councillors from Walloon and Austria, broke up their holidays to help the new movement on its feet.

Children of the crisis

Jean-Paul Besset

The Coordinadora Verde now has the full support of the European Green Party, which is equally convinced that it is the ticket to the future. That helped considerably to persuade the outside world to jump on. But the miraculous rebirth of Green ecology in neighbouring France gave the initiative wings: in France a joint venture of Greens and players from social society called Europe Écologie (EE), has brought political ecology back from a miserable 1,57 % in 2007 to a third place on the political stage, with well over 16 percent during the European elections in 2009 and 12,5 during the regional elections earlier this year.

Jean-Paul Besset, a former journalist and now Member of the European parliament for EE, had crossed the Pyrenees to explain how the initiative was born: within a small group of journalists and NGO leaders, ‘children of the ecological crisis that forces itself upon life in general and the life of each of us in a smashing way’. ‘We saw that on the political level nothing moved’, he said. ‘So we decided to put the issue at the core of the political debate, by launching a call to all parties for which we collected 650.000 signatures’. All candidates promised to include the claims in their programme if elected. Sarkozy, who got away with the prize, even concretised his promise by calling a big gathering of unions, employers, local councillors, NGO’s and all other actors, which proposed a whole series of changes.
But the initiators soon realised that none of those would lead to fundamental changes. So they decided to go into politics themselves, chose Les Verts as the most suitable partner and proposed its leaders not to take them on board but to ‘jointly create a new political force’.

Parti-Guide

That force, Besset said, would not ‘present itself as a parti-guide’, a party that shows society where to go, ‘but to turn towards civil society and invite it to translate the idea of ecological transformation into positive solutions and support’. ‘We don’t define ourselves’, he added, ‘and that is a second fundamental difference with classical political forces, in relation to other parties, but as an authentic formation capable of handling the problems of today’s society.’ The leadership of Les Verts agreed. And the rest of the party did likewise – first accepting to share the places on the election lists on a 50/50 basis with candidates from civil society, then to a merging into a completely new structure. ‘And if we won’t have torn up each other by then’, Besset concluded, ‘in November our new baby will be born.’

His reservation was no futility. Europe Écologie’s election successes have been largely due to celebrities from society. As Martine Alcorta, member of the regional parliament of Aquitaine said: putting France’s most famous anti-globalist José Bové on a poster together with the widely respected anti-corruption judge Eva Joly has been a very strong message indeed. ‘But what we are less good at, is creating a network and include new people into the movement, people who don’t necessarily want a classical party life.’

All shades of green

Florent Marcellesi

To create such an open ‘network party’ has been the French ecologists’ main challenge since March. The key question for the Spanish Greens was different: what should be copied from the neighbours and what should not? Florent Marcellesi (read full text of his intervention), the movements’ analyst (and a former member of Les Verts), showed the way. The new movement should, he proposed, include both Greens and people from civil society, like in France. It should equally look for ‘well-known faces that people trust’. But it has started, he made clear where the French would end: with the grassroots who launched the reunification process. ‘It should use collective intelligence’, he concluded, as a driving force of a ‘political formation that incorporates political and social forces, de-growth movements in a flexible structure by listening and thinking, which is capable defining and giving meaning; which brings together all shades of Green, ranging from ecosocialists to ecofeminists and protagonists of un-growth.’

Pyrenean Park

The task the Coordinadora Verde faces, is a lot more difficult than in France in many respects: it has to increase numbers and acting capacity – ‘at the moment we are only a couple of hundreds and have less than 10.000 euros to work with’, said one of the participants. It has to define which actors from civil society it can cooperate with. And it has to recapture the political space from practically zero.

But they have one advantage: old party structures like those that have been frustrating the reconstitution process in France have practically ceased to exist. So the new movement has its hands free to merge electromagnetic radiation activists, animal protectors, defenders of human rights, seniors, promoters of a Spanish-French Pyrenean Park, Greens and all others who had travelled to Beire into a brand new ‘platform of social and political networks’. ‘And we have one strong weapon’ said an environmentalist from Navarra: ‘the certainty that we have to and can act now’.