Elections

The serious challenges confronting the European Union have placed the future course of its integration in doubt. Against this backdrop, young people have a central role to play.

The recent Austrian elections show there is a lot of discontent with the governing parties and their management of the crises of recent years; in particular the migration crisis, which is an obvious boost for the far right. Nevertheless, to really understand what is happening, one has to consider not only the past and the present, but especially the future.

“The Baden-Württemberg flying green carpet has landed in the middle of society.” These were the words uttered by Winfried Kretschmann in his speech following the victory of the Greens in the German land, a remarkable feat given the odds against them and the current trends playing in favour of the far-right. However, elsewhere in the country, the picture is somewhat different…

Green Parties in Europe have undergone astonishing growth and development over the past decades, but has the time now come to ask ‘Quo vadis’? An interview with Reinhard Bütikofer and Catherine Larrère by Michel Genet.

With the new government in place, everything is seemingly returning back to normal. Or is it? Two weeks after the Slovakian general elections, which stirred great European interest, Robert Fico forms his third government and is preparing to rule for another four more years…

There are now just a few months to go until Brits vote on whether to stay in or leave the EU, yet all the signs are that the hard facts of the debate are not becoming clear enough to the public.

The Irish Greens are back in the Dail (the Irish national parliament).

No-one has the right to rule by force of arms, violence; and no one has the right to dominate others by force of numbers: majority voting. So how should the Greens in particular, and society in general, make democratic decisions?

The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a coalition of Left-wing, Kurdish and progressive parties, was founded in in 2012 in order to help smaller parties amplify their voices and gain access to the Turkish Parliament, where the electoral system stacks the odds strongly against them. In both the 2014 and subsequently recalled 2015 parliamentary elections, the party succeeded in winning over 10% of the vote, the necessary threshold for entering Parliament.

Thirty years on from its transition to democracy after Franco, Spain faces a new transition to another system of government, which has yet to be defined.