Climbing to the Rooftop, Falling off, yet Landing on One’s Feet (and Finding a Wallet on the Pavement?): The Electoral Fate of the Greek Ecogreens (2004–15)

Abstract

After a prolonged period of feeble electoral success, the Ecologists Greens (Ecogreens) managed to break into the Greek political landscape by electing one MEP in the 2009 European election. However, that electoral success proved to be quite short-lived, since in the years to follow the Greek Greens faded away. They were divided and faced the threat of political extinction, only to be resuscitated at the national election of 2015 by allying themselves with the winning leftist Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA). This article draws on archival and survey data to recount the electoral fate of the Ecologists Greens from their creation to their current place in the Greek parliament and government.

Keywords:

• Green Parties
• Green Politics
• Ecologists Greens
• Elections
• Greece
• Economic Crisis
• SYRIZA

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Christoforos Vernardakis and Nicolas Sauger for giving them access to the V-PRC and the Comparative Electoral Dynamics datasets respectively.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Following Rihoux (2001), we consider as ‘relevant’ a parliamentary party that is viewed as a potential partner in government.

2. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Greek_forest_fires.

3. Three (out of eight) of SYRIZA’s electoral posters focused on the wildfires compared with just one of the EGs’. The latter nevertheless made an implicit reference to them: ‘Don’t see everything as black. Vote green’ – ‘Μην τα βλέπεις όλα μαύρα. Ψήφισε πράσινο’ (Source: Greek political parties’ websites, own calculations).

4. Since the EG had made it into the EP they were now entitled to use the services of 34 civil servants for the party’s functions – all of them paid by the state. The party’s budget similarly rocketed, from just €13,000 in 2006 to €2 million in 2010 (Source: http://tinyurl.com/3rylun5).

5. In.gr (8 October 2009), ‘Confusion over PASOK’s proposal to the Ecologists Greens’ (available at: http://tinyurl.com/bzj262p); Ecologists Greens (5 October 2009), ‘The selection of Margarita Karavassili raises hopes for tackling environmental crime’ (available at: http://tinyurl.com/38gwb5n). Ms Karavassili, a political ecology cadre and later (2012) MP candidate with the EG, was appointed head of the Special Secretariat for Environmental Audits by the new socialist government.

6. Eleftherotypia (18 January 2011), ‘Kouvelis [the head of DIMAR] wants to build a bridge over to the ‘Ecologists’ (available at: http://tinyurl.com/bxjyuf7) and EG Executive Secretariat (27 January 2011), Reply to DI.MAR‘s proposal for a bi-partite Dialogue Forum: We are open to dialogue yet we have no privileged interlocutors (available at: http://tinyurl.com/46p2yll).

7. See http://greennewdeal.eu/ (accessed 30 October 2014).

8. The day before the conference, the EG branch in Patissia-Kypseli (Athens) in which Chrysogelos was participating – and where the ‘Socialist Youth’ members had registered en masse under his blessing a couple of months earlier – voted to expel him on the grounds of ‘anti-party behaviour’. This decision was rejected by the party’s Extraordinary Conference a couple of days later. See Efimerida ton Syntakton (14 March 2014), ‘Chrysogelos is expelled from the Ecologists Greens’ (available at: http://www.efsyn.gr/?p=181970) and In.gr (16 March 2014), ‘The Ecologists Greens’ conference did not validate Chrysogelos’ expulsion’ (available at: http://news.in.gr/greece/article/?aid=1231303740).

9. The Greek Pirates’ Party was officially established in 2012 and had competed in the dual national elections of that same year with rather disappointing results (0.5 per cent in May and 0.2 per cent in June).

10. See EG Panhellenic Council (17 June 2014), ‘On the political assessment of the election result’ (available at: http://tinyurl.com/omuvbb5) and ‘The electoral assessment and [our] prospects’ (available at: http://tinyurl.com/phcqcjn).

11. Under Greek electoral law, the 12 ‘national list’ MPs do not compete in any constituency but are elected solely on the basis of their party’s national percentage of the vote.