Europe’s Greens Are Growing Up
One of today’s big questions is how to reconcile the economy with ecology. Green parties could lead the way.
The grown-up Green.
Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Europe’s Green parties are having the best kind of midlife crisis. Born in the radical and hirsute counterculture of the 1970s, their movement is now entering not only middle age but also the hallways of power. Having grown big, though, the Greens must now grow up.
The Greens owe their recent surge in the polls partly to the “Greta wave,” the new zeitgeist of climate consciousness. But they also benefit from a reaction by urban and educated Europeans against the rise of populist parties. Increasingly, the European Union’s voters are leaving the traditional big-tent blocs for the relative clarity of the poles: populists demanding closed societies or Greens defending openness.