The European Green Party is meeting in Antwerp from 18 to 20 May to prepare for the European elections in May 2019, where it is looking to “create a surprise”.
The meeting is part of the process “co-constructing” the political agenda, inspired by meetings with “agents of change” organised in Brussels in March (see EUROPE 11973).
The discussions are expected result in a joint statement setting out the priorities of the incoming political group in the European Parliament.
The European Greens’ 28th Council will also have to decide on a method of choosing candidates, one that will not follow 2014’s open primaries, an experiment that joint party leader Monica Frassoni judged “interesting but costly”.
Candidates should be able to submit their applications until September then be selected by the party in Berlin in November under arrangements that remain to be determined.
Political spaces to fill. The choice of Antwerp for the meeting was is not coincidental, with Belgian local elections being held in October. “Local elections that will have national and European resonance”, according to Wouter Van Besien, the Flemish Green Party, Groen, candidate for Antwerp.
His view is shared by Belgian Philippe Lamberts, joint leader of the Greens/EFA Group in Parliament, who stressed the need to create “political spaces” at local and national levels ahead of the European elections.
Lamberts spoke of Italy, predicting that environmentalist voters for the 5 Star Movement would soon feel “betrayed”, and France, where “everyone has realised that the president is staunchly right-wing”. In his view, both of these political circumstances offer the Greens the opportunity “to be a thoughtful and credible opposition” at national level.
He cited the refugee crisis as an example to illustrate what he meant, arguing that, while Europe could do more than it currently is, that did not mean calling for “the borders to be opened” and engaging in idealistic discourse that few can get behind and many find “frightening”.
“Bed fellows” and political reconfiguration. Lamberts is looking for between 40 and 60 Green MEPs to be elected, enough for the Parliamentary group to “be more influential” within the new political situation.
Currently, the Greens/EFA Group is made up of 52 MEPs, 40 of whom are Greens.
He believes the French En Marche party MEPs are likely to join the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) rather than form a coalition with the European People’s Party (EPP), which, he says, is “in bed with the extreme right”.
“The unity of the EPP owes much more to the size of its Parliamentary group than to its ideological cohesion”, he stated, suggesting that the EPP’s inconsistencies and its tendency to drift to the right would be punished by voters in May of next year.
In this favourable hoped-for scenario, the Greens want to be “a subject rather than an object of negotiation” and hope to attract MEPs from other groups, such as those close to Benoît Hamon.
“There can be no alliance with Eurosceptics”, warned Frassoni, however. Lamberts made clear that this was a red line. He said that “the EU is far from perfect but it is a transnational democratic experiment”. “If you want to pull out of the EU, I respect that, but that is not among our values”, he added.
Proposal on post-2020 MFF well received. Lamberts also spoke about the budget, judging the Commission proposal for the post-2020 multiannual financial framework (see EUROPE 12013) to be generally satisfactory. The proposed figure of 1.114% of gross national income seemed to him to be sufficiently ambitious. “We’ll try to increase the budget in the knowledge that the Council will try to reduce it”, he promised.
He also finds reasons for satisfaction in the structure of the budget outlined in the proposal. “The Commission has been prepared to put in a lot of hard work on own resources”, he said. The greening of the budget, while it could go further, is nonetheless, a “good basis for further negotiations”, he stated. (Original version in French by Mathieu Solal, intern)