The UK general election on 4 July saw a political upheaval. The incumbent Conservative Party collapsed to its worst result in modern history and was replaced in a “loveless landslide” by a Labour government with the lowest proportion of votes of any government since the 1830s. It was in this febrile political atmosphere that the Green Party of England and Wales went from one to four members of parliament: two representing constituencies in medium-sized university cities (Brighton Pavilion, held by the Greens since 2010, and Bristol Central) and two representing large rural constituencies that are composed of small towns and villages (North Herefordshire and Waveney Valley). 

Historically, Green Parties in Europe have drawn their support from urban areas with large numbers of university-educated voters and in competition with centre-left and liberal parties. The UK election result broke that pattern, but Greens had been consistently progressing in local elections in rural areas against Conservative and centrist Liberal Democrat opponents for over a decade.  

On-the-ground campaigning      

The wins were the culmination of years of ground work, but also reflected a shift in thinking about what was needed to target and win in different types of areas.  

“First of all, you need the right candidate,” said Helen Heathfield, campaign manager for Green MP Ellie Chowns in rural North Herefordshire, in the West Midlands region. “When you’re speaking about rural places, it’s generally a conservative-leaning population, and so to appeal to that audience [you need someone who] can make them feel safe, who can make them feel heard, and can impress upon them that they’re going to work really hard as their representative,” she explained.  

That same candidate needs to be able to inspire the hundreds of volunteers needed to run a campaign. “The bulk of our delivery teams, they were not Green Party members, and they’d never had anything to do with the Green Party ever before,” Heathfield said. “And so we also just needed to go with whatever it was that was motivating people to get involved and making the most of people’s friends and family and neighbours.” 

The fact that it took more effort to contact people was turned into a strength.

Rural areas by definition have a lower density of voters, which means delivering leaflets or doorknocking takes more time and more volunteers. Heathfield calculated that it took 350 volunteers to deliver a leaflet to three-quarters of the constituency, and that the remaining quarter was so spread out that it would have taken another 600 (they used the post service to deliver these instead). By comparison, a densely populated urban constituency could be covered by 100 people. Below the sheer number of volunteers needed is a party infrastructure that can coordinate, manage, and support them, ensuring they get their leaflets, that their maps and instructions are clear, checking in on their welfare and ensuring cover for any volunteer who is unavailable. “You actually need people to coordinate them and care for them and look after them, because no one person is capable of looking after 350 delivery volunteers,” Heathfield said.   

But the fact that it took more effort to contact people was turned into a strength, she adds. “Our experience is that there are a whole bunch of Conservative MPs who just haven’t done anything for years and years, or have done very little, and certainly just haven’t been communicating with their residents about what, if anything, they’re doing,” Heathfield said.  

Policies, tone, and style 

On top of having a weak incumbent, an inspiring candidate, and an efficient campaigning infrastructure are the actions, messages, and policies that will get people to change their vote and choose the Greens. On a local level, Chowns had been involved in work to clean up rivers polluted by sewage and agricultural chemicals as a local councillor – something that became an important issue in the run-up to the election.  

The policy platform the Greens put together on the environment and on investing in public services had an appeal across urban and rural areas, explained Adrian Ramsay, MP for Waveney Valley, a constituency of five small towns and 150 villages in East England. “The biggest issue in Waveney Valley is the decline of health services over a long period of time and I talk about that in terms of the particular impact that has in rural areas,” he said.  

Ramsay’s campaign also had momentum because a year earlier the Green Party won an overall majority on Mid-Suffolk Council, which includes most of his constituency, although being in charge locally can have its downsides too, particularly as local government funding has been heavily cut in England since 2010. “Our councillors in Mid-Suffolk are very competent and are able to show a number of significant initiatives that they’ve launched,” Ramsay said. Social care, which is under extreme financial pressure and politically perilous, is the responsibility of the Conservative-controlled county council – as a result Greens are not blamed for its condition because voters understand it’s not within their power.  

So many people who said to me that they’ve never voted for a winner before. They’ve never voted for the winning candidate.

In the end, Ramsay assembled a coalition of voters that spanned rural progressives to lifelong conservative voters who wanted a good representative in parliament. “So many people who said to me that they’ve never voted for a winner before. They’ve never voted for the winning candidate. And that’s people who wanted a progressive MP,” Ramsay said. He added that there were large numbers of moderate conservative voters for whom “voting conservative has been the tradition rather than necessarily, massively ideological”.  

The “tone and style” were important factors in ensuring the progressive messages and policies did not unnecessarily alienate voters, Ramsay said. “I went through the general election, presenting our alternative financial proposals for the country, which are clearly very progressive, and calling for a tax on the very wealthiest, for example,” he explained. But that built on a relationship with the local voters that was developed through “a combination of the strong local campaigning and being seen to be a strong local representative.” 

Breaking the urban bias 

Green parties, like most other parties, have structures and practices that can reinforce an urban bias. Party members, staff, and officials are more likely to live in urban areas, and therefore it is more convenient for party meetings to be held there. If urban perspectives are overrepresented, it also follows that rural areas will look less appealing and be less understood, and then election results will be poorer, reinforcing the view that it is better to focus on urban areas.  

“Most of our campaign materials that are written by the political party in a centralised way don’t fit with most of the things that matter for rural areas,” explains Marie Pochon, a Green MP representing Drôme’s 3rd constituency in south-east France. This means that issues such as transport and access to services and health care are not prioritised in messaging, she continued. It also reinforces a view that distant politicians from Paris are “giving lessons” to rural voters, she said.  

Rural voters in France are increasingly moving away from traditional political allegiances towards the far right. “They give some kind of pride or some kind of political unity in a sense of community that doesn’t exist anymore,” Pochon said. The extreme-right Rassemblement National, which was the most voted party in France’s snap legislative election last summer,  has been able to mobilise economically precarious people with an appeal to grievances and an imagined “golden era” before diversity, women’s rights, or “woke” politics. “Two years ago, the far right was not even on the second round, and this time, they got 30,000 voters” in her constituency, Pochon noted.  

Pochon is working with similarly-minded colleagues to challenge the centralisation and address structural issues in the party, which she believes is a priority, to ensure good internal representation of rural activists and sharing best practices with each other to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns. “We need to work on building people who come from these areas, who live in these areas and who can speak for themselves and speak for the countryside,” she said. 

In Croatia, the Green Party Možemo! (“We can!”) has its origins in “municipalist” movements, particularly in Zagreb, where the directly elected mayor is a Green politician. The 2024 European elections in Croatia took place with the whole country forming one constituency electing its MEPs, meaning it was vital for the party to appeal to rural voters as well as their urban strongholds. The party finished the election with just under 6 per cent of the vote, which meant they elected their first MEP, Gordan Bosanac. However, Bosanac reflects, the party underperformed in rural areas despite him and the party campaigning on issues that were traditionally important in those communities: agriculture and transport.  

“I was going to a lot of farms, small farms, talking with the farmers and the problems they are facing,” Bosanac said, “We chose this strategy because we were really annoyed by the fact that there was this narrative that the farmers are against the greens, which is, of course, not true.” He found that farmers were keen to talk about struggling to access EU support, wages, and working conditions.  

However, these positive conversations were not reflected in the result, which Bosanac says is partly due to the historically low turnout of 21 per cent in Croatia. He is still keen to pursue rural issues in the European Parliament, particularly the plight of small farmers, which may help build electoral support for Možemo! at future elections. There is also a question for Možemo! as a party, as to whether its structure and organising methods need to change to work in rural areas and if it too suffers from urban bias in its structures.   

The rural challenge for Greens appears to be partially structural, reflecting that the power in any institution tends to reside in urban areas; and partly cultural, with a majority of members and activists living in cities and knowing how to campaign in urban areas. On top of that are the very real issues of resources: it takes more funding and people on the ground to build a party, campaign, and win in rural areas. However, as the UK election has shown, there is a demand for change in rural communities – and if Greens don’t respond to it, then more regressive political forces will and already are.