European Greens gain strength from U.S. vote

By Douglas Herbert, CNN.com Europe writer

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Like many of his fellow European Greens, Dominique Liot has little patience with those who would cast third-party U.S. candidate Ralph Nader as the man who connived to possibly steal Al Gore's bid for the presidency.

For Liot, a Green-party foot soldier from the south-western French town of Toulouse, Nader's three percent showing in the race for the White House was a just reward from American voters awakening to an alternative political message that has galvanised Green movements across Europe for decades.

"He didn't steal votes from anybody," Liot asserted.

He was dismissing a popular theory, expounded mainly by Gore supporters, to explain why their candidate is now locked in an electoral stalemate with Republican rival George W. Bush, rather than drawing up his Cabinet.

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Liot's comments came as the French Greens, led by Dominique Voynet, who won 3.3 percent of the vote in France's last presidential elections in 1995, adjourned a fractious national conference marked by an outpouring of accolades for their political blood brother, Nader.

Liot said that Nader, a Harvard-trained lawyer who cut his political teeth as a consumer activist in the 1960s, managed to make impressive inroads despite having to fight a sealed two-party campaign system with small funds.

"If today he has three percent, then once the rules of the game are more democratic, the ecologists will get more than three percent -- perhaps as early as the next elections, provided people militate to modify the rules of the game."

Liot's sentiments echoed those of Darren Johnson, the leader of the Green Group in the London Assembly, in a letter to London's Evening Standard on November 8, a day after the U.S. election.

He said: "If Gore has, indeed, lost it is his own fault for failing to appeal to those voters who are demanding a more radical agenda and insisting that the problems of climate change and the dangers of economic globalisation are confronted.

"If the Green agenda is to really take off on a global scale, then there needs to be a strong voice for Green politics in what is the most influential nation on Earth. Nader's candidacy has helped to build this and for that he should be congratulated."

Nader's showing in the U.S. comes against a backdrop of growing aspirations for European Greens, a broad movement of 32 disparate parties stretched across 30 countries from the UK to the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

While many of these movements are still in their embryonic phases, Green parties have catapulted to national prominence in several large countries, fuelled by a growing concern about issues like climate change and the search for cleaner sources of energy.

In Belgium, the francophone Ecolo movement, created in 1980, won five percent of the vote in 1981, enough for five deputies in the European Parliament. A year later, Ecolo's Flemish-speaking counterpart, Agalev, scored a big electoral victory when it got 50 of its own members elected to local councils.

Meanwhile, the UK Greens have two deputies in the European Parliament, although national elections are yet to return a Green Member of Parliament.

By contrast, the German Greens, Die Gruenen, have fashioned themselves as the flagship of European ecological parties since getting 46 members elected to the Bundestag in the 1998 national elections. Three Green ministers, including Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, serve in a "red-and-green" coalition with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats.

The coalition has focused much of its energy policy on phasing out nuclear energy.

Green politicians in Europe believe Nader's showing comes at an auspicious moment -- a time when Green issues are intertwined in a global political agenda.

In recent weeks, the spotlight on ecological issues has intensified with fierce storms and floods in Europe setting off alarm bells about global warming.

Green politicians in Europe now hope Nader is here to stay. "He made headline news in the U.S.," said Franz Floss, a spokesman for the Federation of European Greens, an umbrella group linking the region's parties. "That means he is now a factor in the political game and I am sure the Greens will stay in the political game.

"If you look at how many people are abstaining from voting in the U.S. I think they are looking for a new political force which is not connected with the bureaucracy in Washington or with (big) business."

Jean Lambert, a Member of the European Parliament for the Green Party of England and Wales, says she and her fellow MEPs discern a growing maturity in the U.S. Green movement.

"We are beginning to see a degree of electoral success. We've begun to feel that it's something that's cohering into a definite political movement, as opposed to a diffuse grass-roots movement."

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November 9, 2000
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November 1, 2000
Nader vows to remain in presidential race
October 25, 2000

The Greens/Green Party USA
European Federation of Green Parties
German Greens (Die Gruenen)
French Greens (Les Verts)
Green Party of England and Wales
U.S. Democratic National Committee
U.S. Republican National Committee

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