Europe’s Greens set sights on trade and tax in Brussels

Europe’s Greens have no shortage of ambition. Unfortunately for them, they also have a shortage of support.

کد خبر: ۸۵۴۸۲۷

تاریخ: ۰۵ آذر ۱۳۹۷ - ۰۸:۲۷

The ecologists on Saturday crowned their two candidates for the European Commission presidency, a fight that they will not win. But rather than a realistic tilt at the EU’s top jobs, the Greens — who lack a support-base in swathes of Europe — are gearing up for a targeted grab on influential tax and trade posts in the European Parliament next year.

“For too long, Europe has been in the grip of multinationals that seek profit, growth and competition above all else,” said Dutch MEP Bas Eickhout, one of two candidates selected to lead the Greens in next year’s election. He made a pitch to position the Greens as a tonic for the ugly side of globalization during a tame primary debate on Friday.

The catch is securing enough support to make a difference.

Despite recent electoral successes in Germany and the Netherlands, POLITICO’s EU-wide election poll aggregator shows that the faction will move backward in the next European Parliament.

Keller, at 37, will be the veteran in the race to replace Juncker, the only candidate to run in both 2014 and 2019.

They count 52 seats now alongside “free alliance” affiliates — such as Scottish nationalists — but polling suggests they’ll secure just 45 seats after next May’s ballot. Eickhout told POLITICO the back-step is partly down to Brexit — with six Brits bolstering the ranks of the party at present.

But the Greens have also failed to secure support in big EU countries like France, Italy and Spain, putting a lid on their ambitions to translate promising polling in Northern Europe to policymaking heft in Brussels.

Delegates elected German MEP Ska Keller and Eickhout as co-candidates in the race to replace Jean-Claude Juncker as European Commission president in 2019 during the sparsely attended three-day congress, a festival of vegetarian menus and €6-a-glass organic wine.

Eickhout made attacks on French President Emmanuel Macron a centerpiece of his pitch to the Greens, saying a fuel tax that sparked violent protests in France at the weekend is a case of Macron trying to engineer a “green transition” paid for by France’s struggling middle class.

Macron’s unpopular efforts at environmental reforms, and the resignation of Nicolas Hulot, his activist environment minister, have made him a target for the Greens. They want to present a rival pro-EU message to voters who Eickhout thinks will become alienated by insurgent movements on both the right and left.

“That new space will appear, and it’s going to be taken by progressive movements where sometimes the Greens do it alone, sometimes the Greens are part of a movement,” said Eickhout.

But efforts to siphon off support from insurgent parties in France and Italy as Eickhout claims remain a lofty ambition given the party has limited support in both countries.

Anna Deparnay-Grunenberg, who is on the list to be an MEP for the German Greens next May, points to party organization west of the Rhine. The French Greens, which she ran for as an expat candidate in last year’s national election, have just a fraction of the membership of her home state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany, she said.

Nevertheless, the Greens aim to take charge of two European Parliament committees in the next mandate. They have set their eyes on chairing the Parliament’s trade and financial services committee, and any permanent taxation committee that may be created, several party officials and candidates said at the party’s annual congress in Berlin.

In the current mandate, the Greens failed to capture the environment committee and instead led the Parliament’s transport and tourism committee — rotating the position between the party’s German and French delegations with a rancorous midway handover.

When the new Green delegation arrives in Parliament in June 2019, it will also be missing several party heavyweights, including the retiring Michael Cramer, a railway expert who was the German chair of the transport committee; Jan-Philipp Albrecht, who steered the landmark General Data Protection Regulation through Parliament and is now a deputy state premier in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein; and Claude Turmes, appointed in June as Luxembourg’s environment minister.

That makes hopes of a “green wave” in 2019, triggered by electoral success in Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, ring hollow at the congress in Berlin. Although Greens govern in Lithuania, and have done so as a junior partner in the Swedish government, the party’s biggest successes have come in Germany.

These days German Greens are polling above 20 percent nationally, have 67 MPs, and participate in four state governments. German Greens co-leader Annalena Baerbock told POLITICO that repeating that success across Europe is essential because “the status quo will destroy Europe, because it’s stagnation.”

Yet the Greens remain a long way off having a head of state to take their power base beyond agenda-setting and amendment filing in the Parliament.

“The German Greens need to deliver the next chancellor of Germany,” said Jesse Klaver, Dutch Green-Left party leader, in Berlin. “The Dutch Greens need to deliver the next prime minister of the Netherlands. This is how we have to think.”