Edouard Gaudot: How would you define leadership? What does it take and how should it be manifested? 

Natalie Bennett: My consideration of this issue started when I decided to stand for leader of the Green Party of England & Wales in 2012. My only experience of party politics being with the Greens, I’d absorbed ideas of what leadership should be – joint, communal, empowering lots of people, not focused on one individual. The post of leader was a relatively new one for the party, only occupied to that point by the towering figure of Caroline Lucas, who’d been rightly focused on using the role to become the first Green MP, climbing the enormous hurdle of the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system.  

One of the things I sought to do was to define what a leader should be doing once we’d achieved that milestone. I explicitly ran saying I wasn’t seeking to get elected myself, but to support lots of other people to get elected. 

Afterwards, I had journalists asking me, “What new policies are you bringing in as leader? What are you changing?” I spent quite a bit of time fruitlessly trying to explain to them that the Green Party works differently from other parties, that the leader doesn’t create or change policy, but simply represents it. British political culture is particularly extreme in its focus on the leadership of the individual, but I think it is a general international reality.  

The Green view, as I came to understand and seek to deploy, is the opposite of that: the role of the leader is (or should be) to help every party member, and every member of society, to be a leader. Every member, just by joining, steps up to lead in their community, to take their society into a different direction. Every citizen can lead, given the chance. 

But that is 180 degrees opposite to the model of leadership that we generally see promoted and exercised across much of society. Trying to get the Green model across is something that we first need to explore, get deeper into understanding, and also work to understand how we can explain it. 

You mentioned that strong idea of individual leadership. This is definitely something that we can observe rising everywhere in the world. There has been a surge in right-wing populism across Europe and not only. Narendra Modi in India is a good example, Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump also come to mind. Is it a fatality of our times? 

Since Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the end of history, we went through a period, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s, when politics wasn’t thought to be about ideology; it was just managing the existing system. There was only one ideology in town and one vision of the way forward. In that period, we had politics as managerialism. 

Then there was the 2007-2008 financial crash. The whole model of our societies had clearly failed, was unstable and put the security of us all at risk. At that point we still lacked large-scale debate about alternatives. The idea that politics could deliver fundamental change had almost disappeared. 

Every citizen can lead, given the chance.

We collectively – I’m saying this as the broadly progressive side of politics – haven’t succeeded in painting a vision, in building a shared understanding that a different future is not just possible, but essential, as happened in Britain and elsewhere after the Second World War, when the welfare state was born. That was a transformative change that people believed in, voted for (to the shock of the status quo) and saw delivered. 

When people don’t have before them such democratic vision of hope that relies on the idea of what they can do collectively, then the alternative is an individual, usually a man, riding up on a white horse, often in a military uniform. The message is: all you’ve got to do, as a person who’s really struggling to survive and fearful about the future, is fall in behind and march in step. This is the easy option. At the moment, it looks all too often like the only option, the sole alternative to an unsustainable, unsurvivable status quo. 

One of the strengths of the populists, whether right or left-wing, is that they “make sense”. We may think that it’s all a lie or that the dream they’re offering would be a nightmare, but they succeed in connecting the dots in a way that resonates. When Marine le Pen in France says that globalisation equates to manufacturing cheap stuff “over there” to sell it to “poor people over here”, she makes an easy yet eloquent point. Are we missing people who can “make sense” on the non-populist progressive side of the spectrum? 

One of our problems is that we make too much sense. As Greens, with our systemic thinking, we look at the economic, social, environmental, political systems and say all of those have to change. We’re right, but we’re not presenting prescriptions that are simple, easy to get into a three-word slogan. We paint a picture of political change, of democratisation of relationships between people, and between people and the natural world – an end to colonialism and extractivism, a “doughnut economy” – in a world that’s unfamiliar with the idea of genuine political choices.  

I believe it’s possible to paint that picture, to present it to people and make it utterly compelling. However, we haven’t succeeded in doing that yet, and while we haven’t – well, “for every complex problem, there is an answer that’s clear, simple and wrong,” as H. L. Mencken famously put it. It is difficult to resist someone storming into the room and saying, “I know the answer, you’ve just got to do this one thing – follow me!” That’s a very simple, easy picture to present, a story to tell. See Boris Johnson’s “take back control” with Brexit. 

Now, we as Greens can’t possibly tell that simple a story, which is why I talk about painting pictures. We have to give people an image of the future in which they are empowered, engaged and have choices, in which they can flourish – a healthy future. 

That’s why I’m so passionate about universal basic income. If people, rather than bosses, get to choose how to spend their own time, each person is then a leader in their own life. They have control in a way that they don’t have now, and they have the space to paint their own pictures of a different way of living. 

The populists have a problem, however. After a few years, their simple answer is clearly not succeeding. They’re not managing the problems, they’re not dealing with persistent issues of poverty, inequality and environmental degradation, simply because they can’t. People’s lives aren’t getting better, and the populists look for scapegoats. That’s a very dangerous point – and we have plenty of historical examples – where the populists double down, become even more authoritarian, keeping control against increasing resistance. Populists can have short-term wins, but they have a very big long-term problem. And that’s a big threat for all our societies.  

The opposite of populism is “government by expertise”. For example, caretaker governments led by highly qualified yet unelected experts, especially in Italy with Monti and Draghi. The constant references to expertise in the public debate have led to a backlash, as illustrated by then-Justice Secretary Michael Gove’s infamous comment during the Brexit campaign: “People of this country have had enough of experts”. Isn’t government by expertise another way of saying, “follow me because I know”? 

No one person can be an expert on every aspect of a situation. You might be an expert on the behaviour of coronaviruses in the human body, but that doesn’t make you an expert in sociology or economics or politics. That is the great problem with the idea of “expert government”. Of course, we need to rely and draw on expert knowledge. Lots of exasperated scientists are asking how to get the UK government to acknowledge, grasp and act on new scientific discoveries. But politics is its own speciality, it requires its own expertise. 

This is also true of the climate crisis. Of course, climate scientists can tell us how many tons of carbon we can emit and what the limits are, but how we cut our emissions down, how we distribute them between the rich and the poor, what choices we make in society, all of those things are not something that a scientist can or should decide. For these questions we need political leadership and collective decision-making. Starting at the level of the village, the suburb, the city.  

One way of delivering that is deliberative democracy, something we’re seeing take off and which is entirely in line with Green principles. It’s only at a relatively small scale at the moment, but the English and French climate assemblies did come up with good answers – far braver, stronger answers than politicians were prepared to deliver. There were also the Irish deliberative democracy processes on equal marriage and abortion. They provided great examples of leadership for Ireland. 

Here we see leadership as decision-making. However, leadership is the capacity not just to make choices but rather to bring people with you and lead them somewhere. How do you bring the people on board towards the solution that you consider desirable and necessary? 

Part of the answer to that question is listening to people collectively. If given the chance, as in the Irish cases, they turn out to be brilliant leaders. But that should also be, less formally, the source of political platforms. I’ve got a crowdfunded book coming out called Change Everything, presenting my version of the Green vision. As I acknowledge within it, that vision was co-created through discussions with thousands of people over a decade, road-tested, enriched, sometimes pieces discarded when they failed to win backers. A successful, politically viable, deliverable vision cannot be created by a single individual or a small team. It must be a collective endeavour. 

Instead, what you get from the populists are slogans that are easy to chant and fit on a T-shirt, and tactics aimed at identifying “enemies” and scapegoating them. This energises 30 per cent or so of the people, and alienates many from the idea of engaging in politics, even to the point of not voting. From the centrists, you get political platforms designed to be as inoffensive as possible – focused simply on saying “we’re not as bad as the other lot”. It isn’t hard to see where the balance of energy lies in such a contest. 

Real leadership is about getting people together, assembling ideas and shaping them into a coherent whole. If you can show that you’ve genuinely listened to a range of voices from a range of perspectives and synthesised the decision, then you can say, “look, this is the decision and this is how I got to it.” People will come to trust you if you make decisions like that regularly. If you’ve got that background of having listened before, it makes a huge difference when it comes to the point where you have to make a snap decision. 

It’s about building trust, in a way. However, I’m wondering whether we are still capable of governing this world, given the difficulties and the contradictory dynamics that we’re dealing with. 

Turmoil, like wars, sometimes may bring about great leadership. Churchill is one interesting example: he was a rather bad chancellor of the Exchequer but a great prime minister in times of war. Zelensky was considered as a clown and now embodies a kind of leadership praised in times of war. But we live in times where it is very difficult to find the defining line between right and wrong, desirable and non-desirable. We live in a chaotic and confusing environment. 

How do we produce leaders who can govern chaos? In France, for example, Sciences Po was created in 1871, in the aftermath of a bitter defeat against Germany, to make up for the failure of the elites. There are similar cases in many other countries: setting up curricula, schools, universities, places where you can produce the elites. How should we produce these leaders now? Has the world become too crazy, too chaotic, too difficult to make sense of?  

I have a different perspective here, and it may be a nationality-influenced one. France has always tended towards the idea of schools, academia, and theory. My British/Australian perspective tends more towards the practical. People often ask me “how do I get into politics?” Of course, you can go and study politics at university, but the real way to learn about politics is by doing it.  

If you organise a litter pick in your street or a campaign to get rid of plastic cutlery in the canteen of your school, you will learn far more about doing politics – which I would define as getting together with others to create change – than you’re going to learn from a year of studying. Politics is practical. It is about getting things done and making change happen. Even if you don’t succeed, you’ll have learned from your failures.

Real leadership is about getting people together, assembling ideas and shaping them into a coherent whole.

There are huge numbers of leaders in our society who step step up daily with little or no attention. In Cornwall, in a very economically deprived village that used to mine china clay, some very poor people who’d had manual jobs, most of them retired, had stepped up to organise a campaign against building an incinerator. They were among the most wonderful leaders I’ve ever met. 

But our societies have gone in the opposite direction; there’s been a narrow professionalisation of leadership in all walks of life. People have got university degrees and qualifications, but they have almost no real-life experience. They have lived in a tiny, narrow world. We’ve got to find ways in which an absolutely magnificent school dinner lady who has started a campaign to improve the school food gets to step up to the next level of leadership. How does she become a councillor? How does she become a member of parliament? Or prime minister or president? 

Traditionally the Social Democrats and the Labour parties have taken people out of the trade union movement into political leadership. John Prescott, for example, was a ship steward and ended up as deputy prime minister of the UK. We’ve almost entirely cut that sort of pipeline off. Leadership of the Oxford University Union does not count!  

Another great example is Malala Yousafzai, Nobel prize winner at the age of 17. We have to draw far more on the experience of young people. The US and the UK are probably the most extreme case studies of leadership by the old for the old. Things in continental Europe look better, but still without nearly enough young people. 

17-year-olds are experts on what it’s like to be 17 today in a way that I, as a 57-year-old, can’t possibly be. In history there are plenty of cases of incredibly young leaders: Louis Braille invented the alphabet that bears his name at the age of 15; Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was 18; William Pitt the Younger became Prime Minister of the UK at 24; and Alexander the Great, though not exactly the model we want, started his campaign of conquest at 18. 

So how do we find leaders? They’re out there; the supply of wonderfully capable, creative, and inspiring people is not short. We’ve just got to make sure they are the ones making decisions for our countries, for the world. Finding those people and supporting them to take roles at all levels, including the very top, is a natural task for the Greens as innovators and pioneers.

Between Meloni or Le Pen on the one hand and Ardern or Marin on the other hand, does it make sense to put a gender on power? The popular view still tends to equate strength, virility and leadership. Of course, this is a stereotype but we hear lots of comments – both quite naïve and appalling – such as “finally a woman in power”. But is it about “any” woman? What about all the Melonis of this world? Can we get rid of the representations of strength and masculinity associated with power? 

There is no doubt that the populist right-wing traditional model of leadership is mostly a man riding on a white horse swinging a sword around. Everything from a deep voice through to physical characteristics –the taller man usually wins the US presidential election; and of course there’s also racial characteristics. There’s a hugely biased idea of what leadership is. But a leader who’s supporting the status quo – it is actually easier for a woman to take that role, to be different in gender but familiar in politics. A woman who wants to deliver real democratic change, now that’s more threatening, more difficult.  

There’s also the stereotypes. Doing the practical politics, I’ve thought very hard about showing emotion. I consciously shut off real emotion nearly all of the time because as I saw it, particularly as Green, you just can’t afford to do that as a woman in politics. You have to be really, really controlled about it. Men do too in some ways but things that are seen as strong leadership in traditional terms are utterly gendered. 

It’s very noticeable just now that we’ve seen leaders like Jacinda Ardern step down by genuine personal choice. It’s very hard to think of many male leaders who have done a similar thing. Now that, I think, is an absolutely wonderful model of leadership. The idea that you contribute for a time, you’ve done your best and now leaving way for someone else bringing in fresh perspectives and fresh ideas. That is clearly, objectively, a really good idea but it’s utterly against the traditional model of politics. 

So renouncing power is a sign of leadership. You also alluded to the drift towards authoritarianism, as the moment when one loses authority, therefore tends to double down, and try to strengthen their grip on power by losing absolutely everything, contact with reality, and with the people. This is the moment they turn authoritarian. 

Is it (and there we might have a gender-biased comment from you) a surprise that only female leaders come to mind when it comes to this great leadership moment of pass on the baton when necessary? 

Yes, saying “I’m tired, I’ve done what I can”, is real leadership. And it does often appear gendered. Why? One side to the question is that women have been socialised to be strong but also to be practical. They are meant in many societies to be the gender who make things work but not in a stagey, “I’m in charge,” kind of way. Their aim is results, not glory.  

Externally, there’s also the fact that women just take a lot more shit of a really narrow gendered kind than men do. Men have a uniform of power and hardly anyone ever comments on what a man looks like. Women, on the other hand, not only have to worry about what they do, they have no choice but to spend quite a lot of time worrying what they look like. Their image is seen far more as a symbol of whether they’re succeeding or failing of their leadership and so women also carry a whole lot of more pressures like that. That’s tiring, and some women at least step aside rather than wait until they fall down. 

Now, when it comes to the Greens: they have a peculiar relationship with power. Sometimes even, “green leadership” sounds like an oxymoron. They might love their leaders but they sure love to hate them too, fearing the personal grip on power.   

There is a saying that “you are not a prophet in your own country” and great leaders within the Greens have often struggled to be recognised as such. It’s an impediment, particularly in our political systems, that are actually putting a lot of insistence and value on the individual capacity to bring forth something. What do you make of this paradox?  

As Greens, we demand a lot more of someone who is elected to a title of leader. I often describe the Green Party of England and Wales as being intensely democratic – and that’s, 95% of the time a wonderful thing. But we also need to collectively let go, to trust. What we should do whenever possible is have that collective, cooperative leadership, getting a whole lot of people who are experts by experience, experts academically, getting a whole range of views and then making a decision. Sometimes, however, it is either not really significant enough for that to be necessary, or there simply isn’t time. Someone has to be in a position to make a decision.  

In our societies, where we have seen so much untrustworthy behaviour from people in positions of leadership, that’s not easy. Because we haven’t in many places seen Greens with the opportunity to really make those decisions, there isn’t a clear track record of showing what we can achieve, of how letting people just get on with their job works out, when they are the right people coming from the right place. On the other side of it, the people we should trust and have to learn to trust– and most Green parties have trusted the wrong people at some point – are those who have earned that trust by showing that they will listen, they are guided by others, by agreed principles.  

It’s a question of building up a store of trust, of “political capital”. Then when you need to use it, and there really is no alternative, people will accept your decision – for example in cases of national security where you can’t show the working for good reasons. At an internal level, when I chair a party conference session, because many people in the room have worked with me before, they know that I’m trying to find a way to get the collective will expressed, so they just let me get on with it. 

Greens are usually elected, selected and also brought to power because they bring about a vision, a horizon. They want us to go somewhere. Of course, when it’s a local election, it’s about making the city more sustainable and beautiful which is a very concrete horizon. But when it comes to a country – like in Germany, or Belgium or Sweden, or Luxembourg – the idea might be to change completely everything, to overhaul the industrial model or the energy model.  

But there is also the nitty-gritty of daily life and all the big questions that we didn’t think we’d have to face. War in Ukraine for example but it could be a trainwreck, a natural catastrophe, a pandemic… History intrudes. Always.

Do you think that the Greens are capable of holding the two ends of the rope, on the one hand keeping the horizon and the vision and on the other hand being trustworthy and having the capacity to actually administrate and managing the daily lives? Because this is what people see. They do want to trust the horizon but what they see is tonight and tomorrow.  

I think it can be really difficult if you have no experience of government. Perhaps you’re not even expecting to be in government – whether at local or national level – and it suddenly lands in your lap. Maybe your vision has really caught voters’ imagination and you go from two councillors to running the council. One day you’re a small opposition party and the next day you’re the government or council administration.  

What we really have to do – and there’s a huge responsibility on Green parties because we are in a time of huge political change – is to think from a very early stage about what happens if we succeed. We need to be ready for the problems of success, to prepare as well as we possibly can. I have some personal experience of this and have still got the scars to show it. We had some of the problems of success in the 2015 election when the Green Party of England & Wales literally overnight stopped being treated as a minor party. Suddenly the media started to interrogate us and look at us in the same way they looked at parties that had been in power on and off for the last 100 years. That sudden change was something we weren’t ready for. 

So how do we find leaders? They’re out there; the supply of wonderfully capable, creative, and inspiring people is not short.

One of the things I do when I go around the country in England and Wales talking to local parties is I urge people to think about the problems of success and prepare for success. It doesn’t have to be enormously detailed, but it has to set the principles and patterns that will be the foundation for action for any outcome. How will you act on the day after the shock election result when you are in coalition talks, or even (as can happen in the UK) alone in running things? 

That’s one reason why as Greens, we need to collectively interrogate what Green leadership looks like, to co-create the models and plans. What are the successes and failures of the past, the examples we have? We need to have a practical model, based on past experience and examples (learning to follow the good and avoid the bad) that we can deploy.  

When then British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan was asked the greatest challenge for a statesman, his answer was: “events, dear boy, events.”: The challenge of politics is to actually deliver an agenda and not be taken over by the day-to-day. That’s a huge challenge. We need to work out how to manage it.  

So according to you, what’s been missing for the Green parties, and this is going to echo throughout the whole European and global Greens, is a “school for the cadres”, as the old left would say. A school for teaching and training your own structure, your future leaders and the intermediaries. Oddly, it is something the Greens have been quite reluctant to put in place. And it might not just be a matter of money. Would you say so? 

That terminology instinctively makes me recoil because it suggests something very centralising and rigid. I went to Kyiv with an MP from Finland last year. Finland is generally agreed to be one of the most successful countries in the world, but it still faces massive challenges, from the Russian giant on its border to climate. One of the things that I learned from her is that Finland has month-long sessions where people from a wide range of walks of life, from business, from politics, come together working through about how they would deal with a major crisis.  

The model I’m envisaging is not some rigid curriculum, with Green “Bibles” that you have to learn by rote, a whole technical vocabulary and a book that sets out a prescription you follow. Instead, give people time and space to think about scenarios, to work through practical examples, to draw on the experience and skills of Greens from different countries. Across Europe and beyond, we have plenty of Greens with experience of being in government at all levels. We need to really convince them to devote the time to mixing with a whole lot of other Greens, set up forums to allow that to happen. 

That would be based on practical learning through experience, learning from each other, dealing with real practicalities, rather than theoretical models. It would also build mentorship and buddy relationships, so that people have someone to talk a problem over with, perhaps someone who’s been through it before. We’re doing this through the Association of Green Councillors in England and Wales and it works well. 

Last question, again on the horizon. Greens are driven by their long-term vision. But it might take more than just a few good Green leaders and successful Green parties to get there. On a historical parallel: welfare states were built by a sort of Gramscian domination of strong post-war values, such as solidarity, social security and redistribution, equality, equity etc – values widely shared across parties and shared all around society. That really helped ensure that, if there was an alternance between Tories and Labour or between right and left in France or CDU-SPD in Germany etc, the democratic alternance was not impeding that build-up of the welfare state. 

Now there seems to be a kind of Gramscian shared culture of society demanding some green measures, whether it’s on energy or food etc. Yet, it seems that Greens are unable to transform this into long-standing strings of policies. The politics and policies remain still difficult to articulate. 

So what is missing to make sure that Green leadership is not just demoted to communication and opportunities of greenwashing by the people who actually take up the ideas but squander them. How can Green parties outgrow their minority culture and really take over the national and or European destinies? 

There are historical moments when change must happen. Broadly speaking, after the Second World War we had 35 years or so where what’s known as the “Overton Window” was essentially occupied by social democracy. Then post-Reagan and Thatcher, this “Overton Window” was filled by neo-liberal political philosophies. 

But this window is now gaping far wider. The public is well aware that neoliberalism has failed our nations and the world. Politics will go one of two ways: either far-right populist or “our” way. For me the Green way is built on the understanding that there are enough resources on this planet for everyone to have a decent life and for us to look after the climate and nature, if we share them out fairly. The far right, by contrast, says it’s a difficult, dangerous world and we’ve got to grab what we can for us and ours and shove the others away, whoever those others are, and eventually build walls to keep them out.  

Because as Greens we tend to be very focused on the individual policies, the great ideas, the practical doing, we don’t necessarily paint that picture. However, I think it’s a very compelling one and it can be presented in a very convincing way.  

One foundation of that vision is care, people having the opportunity and encouragement to care for each other and for nature. Also central are time and democracy. The last area of democracy that collectively we really haven’t tackled yet is giving people control over their own time. That’s the most foundational democracy of all.  

I was debating recently with Martin Wolf, Financial Times Chief Economics Editor. He was saying we can’t have real change, we’ve just got to operate within the parameters we are in. 

But Greens are also offering the idea of real change. This is what people are looking for so there is an enormous opportunity in this historical moment for Green leadership.

This conversation opens a series of essays and interviews dedicated to the crisis of political leadership and the alternatives Green thinking has to offer. Read all contributions here.