The 2020s are shaping up to be a critical decade, both for the Greens and the world at large.

After decades of gradual growth, the Greens began to truly find their feet in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” promise of progress was the spirit of the times. What succeeded this period has been at least a decade and a half of disorder. Liberal democracy’s struggle to grapple with populism and right-wing authoritarianism, compounded by profound technological change and a growing environmental crisis, is a central element of this new disorder.

It is also in this context that green politics in Europe has gained more political power than ever before. Energised by the global climate awakening, Green parties entered government in seven EU countries between 2018 and 2021. Their surge pushed the European Commission to put forward its European Green Deal, an ambitious regulatory agenda aimed at achieving “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.

However, after these achievements came a series of electoral setbacks as citizens turned away when new crises hit. The pandemic, high prices, and war took over the political agenda, and the far right made significant gains by both fuelling and speaking to this pervasive sense of insecurity. Without a compelling vision of what the green transition would mean for people already bearing the brunt of declining public services and growing inequality, the cost of their policies became a wedge issue for which Green parties paid a heavy price. In some places, that picture was aggravated by an image of the Greens as an elite-urban-distant-moralising party.

Now, at the midpoint of the pivotal 2020s, the Greens must trace their journey and take stock of where they stand to determine where they would like to go from here. Such an evaluation is essential for the Greens to move forward once again. Fifty years of history is enough to see patterns, learn lessons and correct course where the green project may have gone off track.

Decades in the making

Today, Green parties are an established political force in Europe, forming the institutional and parliamentary wing of the wider green movement. However, not all parts of the movement sit comfortably in the realm of electoral politics and government. Party and movement, movement-party, or just party – this split personality has been a constant dilemma, unfolding in different ways and at different times across countries and regions.

As a modern movement, the Greens can trace their first stirrings back to the 1960s. Rachel Carson’s environmentalist classic Silent Spring was published in 1962. The 1960s counterculture kicked back against the strictures of mass industrial society: work, family, war. Soon, between 1970-1985, the green movement started shaping up, first as protest parties but gradually becoming more established.

Born at the height of Cold War tensions, this early green politics had anti-nuclear campaigning and pacifism at its core. It was also fundamentally about feminism as championed by activist-thinkers such as Gisela Bock and Eva Quistorp. Through this period, figures like philosopher André Gorz, ethicist Hans Jonas, and sociologist Ulrich Beck further contributed to the emerging green critique of industrial society.

In a landmark moment, the forefather of French political ecology, Réne Dumont, ran for the presidency in 1974, finishing 6^th out of 12 candidates. In 1979, the first Green member of parliament was elected in Switzerland. Just two years later, Belgium’s two French and Flemish-speaking Green parties also made it into parliament. A watershed moment occurred in the 1983 West German elections when 27 Greens members were elected to the federal parliament in Bonn. Always transnational in outlook, in 1983, Green parties began to work together through the European Coordination of Green Parties. Finally, the Greens entered national government as a major coalition partner for the first time in Finland in 1995.

But this progress was most visible in the north-west of Europe. By contrast, the Greens remained activist movements first and foremost in central and eastern Europe, despite the prominent role of environmental concerns in the pro-democracy movements – such as the Baltic Way – that ultimately led to the fall of communism. Although the Czech and Hungarian Green parties were founded in 1989 and 1993 respectively, many green movements chose not to form parties until much later. And where they did take this step, well-meaning attempts to import the western European template of green politics often failed to take root. Elsewhere in the east, notably Latvia, the first incarnations of green politics wedded environmentalism to social conservatism, putting them at odds with the international movement (although in later years, further developments in the Baltics led to Green forces becoming credible coalition partners in government).

In the 2000s, the balance began to shift more clearly, though never totally, towards the Greens as a party. In north-western Europe, parties professionalised and gained influence, notably on energy, climate, peace, and LGBTQIA+ rights. At the same time,  more green parties were created in central and eastern Europe.

As the EU accepted new members and stood on the verge of deeper integration, the European Green Party was formed in 2004 and united the movement around a pro-European vision. The rejection of the European Constitution by Dutch and French voters the following year led to the intergovernmental European Union that we have today.

In the years following the 2008 global financial crisis, politics exploded across Europe in a backlash against austerity. But despite the potential of democratic impulses in Spain, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere, the Greens failed to capture this new energy. Only later, with Greta Thunberg’s activism gaining international attention and the start of the Green Wave around 2018, did Green parties translate their steady rise into widespread influence with their entry into government in seven EU countries.

From the margins to the mainstream

After five decades of ups and downs, the Greens can now claim to represent a political force that stands shoulder to shoulder with the three dominant traditions of European politics: conservatism, socialism, and liberalism. With socialism being at least 100 years old and liberalism and conservatism both considerably older, green politics seeks to offer a fresh alternative to the status quo. Its persistence in carving out a space in the cut-throat political landscape and the world of ideas is an achievement in its own right and reason to warn against doom-mongering about the Greens’ future. Because of that persistence, green politics today has more people, experience, and resources than it did throughout most of its history.

Green politics’ persistence in carving out a space in the cut-throat political landscape is reason to warn against doom-mongering about the Greens’ future.

Unlike its elder competitors, however, green politics lacks an “ism”. The green movement, of course, defends certain core values like environmental sustainability, social justice, grassroots democracy, international peace, and human rights. However, these values do not make up an ism. This is not an intellectual critique but a political problem, because “isms” are values grounded in an ideal and a vision of society. It is not the “ism” that matters, but the ideal.

Political movements fundamentally depend on people fighting and making sacrifices. And people (and certainly mass movements as opposed to activist groups) fight for ideals. The memory of Rosa Luxembourg giving her life for the liberation of the working class stirs the heart of any socialist. Do the Greens have similar ideals and the heroes willing to put themselves on the line? This question should be unsettling for Greens. In the 2020s, Green parties have clear values and still have the resources to organise their political comeback. But do they have the ideals around which to build it?

This point is demonstrated by a key Green achievement of recent years, the Green New Deal (GND), and the closely linked and much more fundamental energy transition. The Green New Deal was a great unifying concept that the Greens put forward as a response to the 2008 crisis. Opposing neoliberalism’s emphasis on austerity, the GND aimed to return control to the state and to build a new green future. The Green New Deal also called for public investment in developing renewable energy and green infrastructure. New industries would bring jobs, thus turning back the tide of deindustrialisation that was fuelling the rise of the far right while also saving the planet.

As the Greens campaigned on the Green New Deal, it became a shared project for them and much of the democratic Left, who also contributed significantly to its strength as a political offer, especially in the United States. Without the Green New Deal, the European Green Deal, the EU’s pandemic recovery fund, and the US’s Inflation Reduction Act would have never come to light. At the same time, it is questionable whether Green parties were ever really identified with this programme in the eyes of citizens. After all, what was daily life going to be like in a Green New Deal society? In the United States, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s democratic socialists put forward some ideas, but Green parties never fleshed out what this ideal was going to mean for you, your children, your workplace, and so on. This foundational weakness in the Green New Deal project also explains how it was so easily co-opted into an EU regulatory agenda and became a subsidy scheme for corporate America.

The widespread recognition of the need for an energy transition is a crowning recent success for Green parties. After a long struggle by the Greens – both as movement and party – the reality and urgency of the climate crisis are now acknowledged across the political spectrum. With the Greens acting as the party-political tip of a societal lance extending from the scientific community to street movements, the climate became a key issue in the late 2010s.

However, although the need for action was almost universally recognised, it was unclear what exactly needed to be done. The energy transition became the most agreed-upon part of the answer as most people now believe that we must considerably expand our renewable energy capacity. But the energy transition is only the first step towards addressing the much deeper climate problem; one that is not just technological, but social and political too.

For Green parties, the solution to the climate issue was mainly centred on reducing emissions through setting climate goals. However, focusing on “targetology” had two pitfalls: first, the emphasis was on imposed limits that left crucial distributional issues unsettled. Second, citizens were largely not offered a clear idea of why the climate agenda would benefit them in their daily lives or help them through the litany of struggles they already faced.

The lack of substantive content behind the notion of “the climate” made it easy for other political forces to readily assimilate it into their vision and greenwash their offers. At the same time, this shortcoming left the Greens cornered, painting them as the freedom-hating party of limits and bans, a stereotype they have long strived against. Both in campaigning for the Green New Deal and advocating for the energy transition, Green parties concentrated too much on policy rather than an ideal that could guide a vision of society. While this focus helped cement green influence on policymaking circles in the late 2010s and early 2020s, it held them back from developing tangible and locally rooted political offers that spoke to citizens. With the anti-green pivot of the centre-right and some segments of the business community since then, Greens need to realise that the years ahead will be dominated by politics, not policies.

Green parties have clear values and the resources to organise their political comeback. But do they have the ideals around which to build it?

An identity dilemma

In the absence of clear ideals, the Greens still have their values. They have often defended these principles through discrete fights, leading to the characterisation of Green parties as an alliance of movements and as a community. But while being part of a community of values can be unifying and empowering, it also brings with it the risk that the movement would crystallise around a certain identity – a Green identity. This identity has proved a sticking point for Green parties when it comes to their relationship with power.

The story of a movement that is also a party, but which remains a movement in its “DNA”, is one that many Greens know and identify with. And nowhere is this contrast more challenging than when the Greens run for office.

The movement and the party have different objectives in political struggles. The movement seeks to organise citizens and push for change. The party, whether anchored in a movement or not, seeks to make that change happen through government. The movement aims to move and expand the Overton window – the range of what is politically possible – through mobilisation. The party can lead and campaign to shift the window, but it needs to operate within that space, especially when it approaches power. For Green parties and especially their membership, this gulf between campaigning politics typical of an NGO and the realities of the corridors of power brings an aversion to entering government: better stick to their radical posture than compromise by governing in an imperfect world.

This ambiguity is also the niche that Green parties play in – a strategy that author and journalist Peter Unfried describes as “power and resistance”. Green parties have at times seen constructive opposition as a core part of their identity. In Belgium and France, some Greens even theorised their role as “participopposition”, i.e., playing the parliamentary game but without aspiring to govern. Between social democracy’s managerial offer to play the political game with the interest of working people at heart, the radical left’s pitch to build in opposition until transformation is possible, and liberal politics’ much greater emphasis on the role of the individual, Green parties sit somewhere in the middle. Their radical identity means that they want to be at the barricades. Their reformist practice means that they are willing to compromise and enter government when possible. Meanwhile, their emphasis on individuals, communities and civil society as the ultimate drivers of change makes them sceptical about government and using the state as a lever of power.

These competing ideas have played out repeatedly in Green parties whenever the possibility of government has arisen. After all, the experience of government almost inevitably spells disappointment for a movement-party. Being in government means ministries, bureaucracy, and public tenders; it is politics as the “slow boring of hard boards”, as Max Weber put it. For Green parties still caught in this dilemma, this can be hard to accept. In the 2020s, Green parties need to ask themselves whether they can still afford to oscillate between resistance and responsibility  – or is it time to make their intentions for government explicit?

This stance also has roots in the sociology of Green parties and their memberships. While the green identity is progressive, it does not escape the pitfalls of all identities and identity politics. Being part of a tight-knit community with its origins on the margins of power, Green parties tendentially fear expansion and openness because opening up risks compromising the integrity of the core. When coupled with the class make-up of many Green parties – largely urban, middle-class, and highly educated – the result is a movement that struggles to reach people beyond its established circles. The Green parties that have made the most progress when it comes to speaking beyond their core and reaching citizens from across the political and social spectrum – such as the German Greens, the Finnish Greens, and Denmark’s Green Left –  have almost entirely jettisoned their protest-party legacies. But even in the German case, this shift, let alone the development of a new guiding vision, remains far from complete.

With the anti-green pivot of the centre-right and some segments of the business community, Greens need to realise that the years ahead will be dominated by politics, not policies.

Breaking out

To set themselves free from their identity trap, Green parties need to focus on people. More than ever before, we live in a society of individuals, each carrying a multitude of different identities and values. Our societies are far more heterogeneous and fragmented than they were just a few decades ago, and the units around which many political understandings and assumptions were shaped are now less valid. In this atomised society, even a political project committed to the collective good needs to address people as individuals.

Speaking to people on an individual and even personal level will require getting out onto the streets, building new connections, and having conversations about people’s daily lives. Upon entering government, Green parties have generally opted for portfolios tied to fights closest to their hearts: the environment, climate, transport, and perhaps equality. To build an offer centred on people and put forward policies that do not limit but enable and guide, the Greens must invest more in portfolios with people at the centre, such as education, culture, and justice.

Renewing the green vision for the decade to come will also require deeper engagement with the world in the pivotal 2020s. European and global societies are changing profoundly, far faster than most progressive parties have been able to keep up with. These changes demand a forward-looking offer not based on an uphill battle to green the society as it exists today, but a realistic yet desirable vision of how it could be tomorrow. To this end, there are six areas that demand greater attention.

First, care. From kindergartens to retirement homes, the care systems that our ageing societies have long depended on are bursting at the seams. As the need for care – understood as a relation rather than any one sector – continues to grow in increasingly lonely societies facing a mental health crisis, there is an opportunity to build a vision of a society with community and people at the centre.

Today the burden of care is carried mainly by informal and unwaged labour, leading to the second point, work. The world of work has changed dramatically compared to the stable, long-term jobs around which many communities, support networks, and social security systems were built. What is the green vision for work that can offer protection against the new insecurities of our times – precarity, technological change, and the accelerating impacts of the climate and environmental crisis – and their articulation through longstanding gender, racial, and class divides?

Third, technology, or tech. While the first Trump administration took power with a fundamentally reactionary vision of America, the Trump 2.0 movement is shaped by a forward-looking, space-age tech politics. For the time being, European societies are left as spectators, scarcely grasping the logic of techno-authoritarianism as it tightens its hold on information systems and elections. Will the Greens rise to the challenge of turning technology into a force for democratic liberation and collective ownership, rather than a tool for corporate control and profit-driven surveillance?

Fourth, Green parties must rebuild their internationalism amid geopolitical chaos. The Greens and the European Union were born under the tenets of Washington Consensus-era global governance: (sustainable) development, free trade and liberal internationalism. With the decline of the West, a new multipolar disorder is emerging. The task of Green parties must be to reconcile their growing security awareness with an understanding of the world that can look beyond past certainties, remaining grounded in peace, democracy, and ecology amid increasing militarisation and war.g

Within education lies perhaps the Greens’ greatest hope.

Fifth, the window for investment is open once more. With the return of geopolitical competition, the neoliberal push to hollow out state capacity has reached its limits. Even with the rigid market framework of the European Union, industrial policy has made a comeback. Now states are hiking defence spending, which is spilling over into infrastructure investment and industry. Can the Greens seize the opportunity of investment to build a credible economic offer that speaks to citizens and business alike? For that to happen, Green parties must also live with and learn to handle the state, its apparatus, and its unique position to lever collective action for the greater number, without relinquishing subsidiarity and internationalism.

Finally, amid all these changes, the Greens must build a project of education. Education is our tool to prepare people for life – and through life. Neglecting it means disregarding the development of people who understand and can navigate the world as it is and will be. Within education lies perhaps the Greens’ greatest hope.

Freedom: a rallying cry

Moving forward, the Greens must rediscover how to tap into the deep emotional well of freedom once more. The fiercest political struggles in today’s Europe – Ukraine, Serbia, Georgia, Turkey – have freedom at their core. If there was one point that united two of the most influential movements in the EU over the past few years, the farmers and the climate strikers, it was that they were asserting their freedom to a future, one that they could envisage but also shape and decide upon. Yet the Greens have somehow allowed themselves to be caught on the wrong side of the freedom debate.

Instead of a force for freedom, they have become the party of transition – of something that you must do, or that will be done to you. While recognising that the world is changing and demanding a societal response has been one of the Greens’ greatest political strengths, it will never be as powerful as making citizens feel supported. After all, the European welfare state is built on the idea of security in transitions. For sickness, there is the hospital. For retirement, there is the pension. And for childbirth, there is parental leave. In these protections lie some of our greatest freedoms.

As the Greens emerge from the difficulties of recent years, preparing for what is ahead will require more than simply reassembling the troops and dusting themselves off. Faced with a world in flux, they must strive to be the party of security in transition, offering protection and an ideal of a life worth fighting for.

This article is the product of a discussion between the authors and Vesna Jusup (former Head of Policy, Strategy, and Capacity Development, European Green Party), and Özgecan Kara (former Secretary General, Federation of Young European Greens).