How did the Greens end up fumbling so many left and progressive votes to the Lib-Dem neoliberals?

Under the circumstances the Green Party did pretty poorly at the European elections.

Yes I know I'm going to have to explain this in light of the fact that they won their biggest share of the vote since they bagged 14.5% in 1989, and their most seats ever with 7 MEPs, and got the wonderful Magid Magid into the European Parliament to represent the Yorkshire and Humber region that was electing the BNP there just 10 years ago.

12% of the vote is an improvement on the Green performance last time around, but under the unique political circumstances it's actually a pretty poor showing.

The Greens should have done really well because they're unambiguously on the progressive side of the three most burning political issues of our time.

Their name alone is evidence enough that they're serious about combating environmental degradation, they've been campaigning against the blight of ruinous Tory austerity since well before Jeremy Corbyn took Labour back from the orthodoc neoliberals and put an end to the austerity-imitating gibberish that lost them the 2015 General Election, and they're unambiguously opposed to Brexit.

Add in the stuff like the Extinction Rebellion protests, the School Strikes for Climate Action, ever growing awareness of the mess we're making of this planet, and we've got to be left asking if 2019 wasn't the time for the Greens to break through into the political mainstream, when will it be?

There's plenty of ground for arguing that their obsession with an "another roll of the dice" referendum is a massive waste of Green political energy, but there's no doubt that if you're a social progressive who really wants to stay in the EU so much you'll gamble everything on a referendum despite the Tories still in power to rig the whole thing in their own favour, then the Greens are obviously the ones for you (unless you're from Scotland or Wales where the SNP and Plaid Cymru also have justifiable claims to represent progressive Brexit-sceptics).

But somehow the Greens got absolutely steamrollered by the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, welfare-vandalising, wage-repressing, infrastructure-underinvesting Lib-Dem neoliberals who were the venal self-serving charlatans who wilfully helped the Tories lay the groundwork for Brexit to happen in the first place by trashing our wages, public services, social safety net, and living standards between 2010 and 2015.

Somehow, out of the minority of those who could be arsed to vote in the Euro elections (just 35.6% bothered), the majority of the anti-Brexit vote went to the disgustingly unrepentant Lib-Dems, rather than to the Green Party who had exactly the same anti-Brexit stance, but with absolutely none of the austerity blood on their hands.
 

The rise of the Greens in Germany puts the UK Greens' failure into perspective. Despite no Brexit bandwagon to leap onto the German Greens doubled their vote to 20.5% and bagged 21 MEPs, meaning they finished in second place behind Angela Merkel's centre-right CDU.

In the days after the election the German Greens have risen further with the post-Euro election bounce lifting them to the top of an opinion poll for the first time in their history on 27%.

Meanwhile in the UK it's the austerity-enforcing, wage-repressing, renewable subsidy-slashing, public service-trashing, welfare-vandalising, Royal Mail-privatising Lib-Dems who are gleefully basking in the post-Euro election bounce at the top of outlier polls.

It's difficult to get down to why the Green campaign has faltered so badly in the UK, when all the factors seemed to be pointing in their favour. But as someone who is broadly supportive of their party (especially on stuff like opposing austerity, protecting the environment, and renationalisation) I'll have a go:

Mainstream media bias: The Greens have fought tooth and nail for years to try to get fairer representation in the mainstream media, but to no avail. They're continually locked out of election debates, denied party political broadcasts, and treated as a minor party, even though they went into the 2019 Euro elections with triple the seats of the supposedly bigger Lib-Dems.

Leadership structure: The Greens have an unusual joint leadership between Siân Berry and Jonathan Bartley instead of one high profile leader. It's possible that this unusual leadership structure make them seem more like well meaning political amateurs than a serious political party. However this doesn't explain the disparity between the UK and German Greens because they too have a shared leadership structure. Perhaps the polarised hyper-partisan, and divisive nature of British politics means Brits are somewhat less open to ideas like shared leadership and compromise?

Leadership figures: One of the German Greens' co-leaders is Robert Habeck who is an almost ubiquitous figure in the German media and a former government minister in the Schleswig-Holstein region, and the other co-leader is Annalena Baerbock who is a member of the Bundestag (the main German parliament). Neither Jonathan Bartley nor Siân Berry have anything like as high profiles (Bartley is a local councillor in Lambeth, and Berry has a seat in the London Assembly which is an institution barely mentioned by ordinary folk in London, let alone us yokels outside of it). Unfortunately Caroline Lucas is still the only major figure in the UK Green Party ranks, but it's understandable that she wants to concentrate on her duties in parliament rather than acting as party figurehead.

Naivety: All the stuff about forming electoral pacts with the Lib-Dems and the CUK squatters before the Euro elections was extremely poor from a Green perspective. Instead of positioning themselves as making a more or less identical/interchangeable anti-Brexit offer as the two overtly neoliberal Remain parties, they should have strongly and clearly distanced themselves and made it clear that they were the only UK-wide Remain party willing to address the actual causes of Brexit in the first place (austerity, wage repression, public service cuts, welfare vandalism, infrastructure underinvestment ...). Presenting themselves as Lib-Dem allies in the fight against Brexit allowed the ever cynical Lib-Dems to use "tactical voting guides" to lure people into abandoning the Greens and voting Lib-Dem as the supposedly biggest Remain party. Failure to heed the basic  political axiom "never trust the Lib-Dems" is remarkably naive stuff.

General antipathy: One factor that it would be easy to overlook is the general UK public antipathy towards the Greens. We've all seen people dismissing them as mung bean-weaving, sandal-wearing, hippy-dippy fruitcakes over the years. Maybe the Greens seriously need to think about toughening up their image as seasoned battlers in the existential crisis that out-of-control capitalism is inflicting on our planet?

Lack of clarity: By presenting themselves as being basically inter-changeable Remain protest votes with the Lib-Dems and CUK squatters, the Greens threw away their chance to explain why they were the better alternative and handed all the political momentum to the more establishment-friendly Lib-Dems.

Poor strategy: In the final days before the EU election practically all I noticed from Green activists on Twitter were efforts to pinch left-leaning Labour voters by attacking Labour's Brexit position, rather than focusing on convincing the sizeable and defined Remain demographic to vote Green instead of the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems. Instead of appealing to a large well defined demographic as the best option with no austerity baggage, they were wasting their efforts on desperately trying to erode a final few Labour votes from a party already reduced down to its core support.
 

Ineffectiveness: Even though a lot Green effort was expended on trying to pinch Labour votes during the the final days of the Euro election campaign, the evidence suggests that far more Labour supporters deserted to the pro-austerity Lib-Dems than to the anti-austerity Greens! If the Greens failed to even convince Labour deserters to back them instead of the pro-austerity Lib-Dem Tory collaborators, they clearly failed quite spectacularly. Someone within the Green ranks would have to conduct the autopsy but letting millions of left and centre-left votes slip through their fingers to be gobbled up by the orthodox neoliberal Lib-Dems was a disaster.

Differences in the traditional left: The traditional left SPD party in Germany has completely lost its way and people are crying out for an alternative. Jeremy Corbyn has revitalised the Labour Party, binned the orthodox neoliberal tripe that was driving voters away in their millions, and returned to genuine democratic socialism. Even though the low-turnout Euro Elections were incredibly poor for Labour, they haven't been floundering as badly as the German Social Democrat Party for the past four years. Coming up against a stronger traditional left than the German Greens still doesn't explain how the UK Greens let so many votes slip through their fingers to the Lib-Dems though.

Brexit fixation: Perhaps the German Greens did so well not despite the lack of a Brexit bandwagon to jump on, but because of it? Perhaps jumping on the exact same People's Vote bandwagon as the Lib-Dems and CUK squatters ended up obscuring and diluting the core Green policies that differentiate them from the pro-austerity neoliberal parties they decided to side with? Perhaps Brexit brain worms cost the Greens their best ever chance at making the breakthrough to the political big time?

It would be a futile task to try to identify one single reason that the Greens faltered and fumbled millions of potential votes through their fingers in the UK to the benefit of a bunch of unrepentant neoliberals, while the Greens surged to position themselves as the 2nd party in German politics, but it's important for UK Greens to avoid celebrating marginal gains when they should have been making significant headway, and for them to get a feel of what went so wrong so they can learn from their mistakes.

If you've got any other ideas about why the Greens faltered so badly, feel free to share them in the comments.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR