Amending the future

And here I am again, in a session of the 14 Council of the European Green Party. A session that actually is very boring to go through, but very relevant to be present in. This is, as a matter of fact, the end point of a process of almost two years, a period where the European Green Party has been looking at organizations that would help to develop our potential to the future. We have many discussions behind our backs, and now we are checking the last words, to phrase our work in the most “crystal clear” way (just quoted from the chairperson)

As it goes in these moments, so far we have expend minutes, actually many minutes, warming up in a discussion on the differences between “agenda”, “process” and “platform”. Slowly we came down to business, and some amendments where withdrawn, and others clarified for the vote of tomorrow.

Interesting for this writer (and perhaps for a writer of this post in this website) is that the whole text that we are slowly going through, points in a definitive direction: the supporters, or ISN, have an unclear status under (or inside) the EGP. The solution that the current board of the EGP has chosen for is to eliminate the ISN from the Statutes of the  EGP, since the EGP is a organization of parties, leaving the ISN to be defined later in “The Rule Book”. If we would be suspicious, it is possible to construct this movement as a step back in the progressive movement that the ISN supports, of making the EGP move from a parties’ party, to a persons’ party. But, on the other side, having our definition present in the more flexible Book of Rules instead than in the statutes, means also that the ISN can remain experimenting with different schemes to increase political participation of individuals inside the EGP. We have chosen for this second -and more optimist- view… and hope to be right.

But besides this point, one and a half hour after the start of the session, I can report that the opening words of the leaders of this session actually proved to be correct: “We are happy with the proposed amendments, since they do not surprise us, and reflect the discussion that we had have”. Tomorrow will see which amendments make it to the final text. So I guess that this is as good as any other way to end the report of this session.