OLD CONTENT
Not all bad news coming out of the 2019 EU election:
news.yahoo.com/green-wave-eu-vote-amid-climate-crisis-194422602.html
Berlin (AFP) - With double-digit scores across Europe's biggest countries including a stunning 20 percent in Germany, the Greens bagged record gains in EU elections on Sunday with younger voters leading calls for action to halt global warming.
The environmental party doubled its score in Germany from the last EU elections in 2014, knocking the Social Democrats off their traditional second place.
In France, the Greens were number three with 12 percent, while in Austria, Ireland and the Netherlands, they garnered double-digits.
In Britain, they were on 12.4 percent, nearly double their previous score, and beating the ruling Conservatives into fifth place.
"To see The Green Party beating the Conservatives so far in these elections is truly amazing. Something seismic is happening in British and European politics," said Alexandra Phillips, Green Party candidate for South East England.
With the two main traditional EU blocs -- the conservative EPP and the centre-left Social Democrats projected to lose ground, the Greens could end up as kingmakers in the European Parliament.
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In Ireland, Green Party candidate Ciaran Cuffe was on course to top the first preference tally in Dublin on 23 percent of the vote, with the Greens also seen in contention in the country's two other constituencies.'
Our enemies are not happy about it:
oklahoman.com/article/feed/9917921/green-wave-europe-wakes-up-to-climate-concerns-after-vote
Alexander Gauland, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, declared the Greens "our main enemy."
"The Greens will destroy this country, and our job must and will be to fight the Greens," said Gauland, whose party has claimed that climate change isn't a man-made phenomenon and that efforts to tackle it will harm Germany's economy.
In addition to pushing for action on climate change, the Greens have generally positioned themselves as a counterweight to anti-immigration parties such as Alternative for Germany, which have decried the influx of migrants from the Middle East.
Greens tend to have a good grasp of what Western civilization is about via their own field of specialization, as they have been watching for a long time how those who damage the environment least are the ones who have to suffer the worst effects of the damage:
edition.cnn.com/2019/03/31/africa/poorest-hit-the-hardest-climate-change-mozambique-intl/index.html
"This is one of the poorest places in the world, which is paying the price of climate change provoked mostly, not only but mostly, by the developed world," the 73-year-old added.
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Many of the world's poorest live in equatorial regions, which already have high average temperatures. This means a tiny rise can be sharply felt and lead to harsher impacts, according to a 2018 study in Geophysical Research Letter.
Meanwhile, most of the world's richest nations are the largest emission producers -- by burning fossil fuels and modern farming practices that produce climate change causing emissions.
Using climate model projections, the paper found that if global average surface temperatures reached the 1.5 or 2 degree Celsius (3.6 degree Fahrenheit) limit -- set by the Paris Agreement -- countries like Indonesia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo would feel the changes brought on by global warming more keenly than higher latitude countries like the United Kingdom.
https://europeangreens.eu/---
The following article is a good introduction to how the issues link up from a Green perspective:
www.thenation.com/article/climate-change-refugees-open-borders/Open Borders Must Be Part of Any Response to the Climate Crisis
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The ice is thin and getting thinner. On May 16, one Italian and four English scientists published the results of 25 years of satellite monitoring of the Antarctic ice sheets. Their findings were discouraging: The vast Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers are thinning five times faster than they were in 1992; 24 percent of West Antarctica is now “in a state of dynamical imbalance.” Four days later, another study predicted that under a “business as usual” scenario—i.e., the current plan—sea levels will swell by more than two meters by the end of the century, resulting in the displacement of 187 million people. That figure does not count those displaced by other climate-related catastrophes: desertification, drought, wildfires, floods, crop failures, hurricanes, etc. Even so, the authors wrote, there will “clearly” be “profound consequences for humanity.”
We are already beginning to suffer some of them. The racism and fear that dominate the terms of the “immigration debate” prevent us from seeing it, but the climate crisis is one of the major factors spurring the movements of human beings across borders. Severe drought in Central America has been pushing Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans north through Mexico to the United States. Droughts in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and the Lake Chad Basin have been driving many thousands from both north and sub-Saharan Africa to risk the journeys across the Sahara and the Mediterranean to Europe. A sustained drought in Syria caused massive internal displacement, helping to spark an uprising that degraded into war, causing hundreds of thousands to flee across borders that, for all their apparent permanence, didn’t exist a little more than a century ago.
The timing could not be worse. In the absence of an actual world war, national borders have never in human history been as militarized as they are today. Borders, like nations, present themselves as natural and eternal. They are neither, but movement is. Humans have been on the move for hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of years. For centuries, institutions like slavery and serfdom restricted the movements of the sectors of society that did most of the work, but until just over 100 years ago, per John C. Torpey’s The Invention of the Passport, there was no “consensus for the view that states had an unequivocal right to bar foreigners from entry into their territory.” Passports were not generally carried or required until the First World War. The United States had no Border Patrol until 1924. Borders as we now understand them—the fixed and impermeable shells of what the political economist Karl Polanyi called “the new, crustacean type of nation”—did not exist when my grandparents were born.
Over the last hundred years, borders have come to function much as serfdom did until the 19th century: as a means of restricting the movements of the poor. Some of us are free to hop continents, suffering only the discomforts of economy seats; for the wealthy, scholar Parvathi Raman points out, “open borders are already a reality.” Others, who the accident of birth deprived of the right brand of passport, die by the tens of thousands in the deserts and in the Mediterranean. Thousands more survive the journey only to be detained, caged, tortured, and starved, or dumped back where they started.
The planet’s most prosperous residents, meanwhile, have not been gracious about their good fortune. Manufacturing a “crisis” at the borders in order to justify their further hardening has for decades been a project of the super-rich, one achieved through years of investment in think tanks, media, and political candidates spouting “populist” rhetoric. Some of the individuals who have profited most from the creation of the climate crisis are the same ones demanding that the fictional boundaries that disfigure the planet be reinforced with a violence that is all too real. One quick for-instance: The main, long-term funder of the anti-immigrant movement in the United States is the Colcom Foundation, which relies on the fortune of the Mellon Scaife family, and hence of Gulf Oil, now Chevron. To protect their investments, perhaps, Scaife family foundations have also funneled tens of millions into climate-change denial.
If the 20th century offered just one lesson, it is that the ice is always thinner than we think. The centrifugal forces holding nations together are the same ones that can tear the world apart. Ours is already beginning to fissure. In 2015 it took the arrival of fewer than a million refugees, about half of them from Syria, to push a continent of more than 700 million into a panic that continues to threaten the European Union with dissolution. (For comparison, imagine 700 of the most comfortable people human history has ever known all freaking out because a single tired stranger is knocking at the gate.) In the United States, a country of 329 million, the presence of 11 million people without the appropriate papers or levels of melanin has been enough to bring national politics to a near standstill, send an obvious cretin to the White House, and rehabilitate the concentration camp as a viable form of housing for children.
This is just the beginning—of the climate crisis, and the political unravelings that will continue to accompany it. And so, it is time to shout, and loudly, that the freedom of all the earth’s people to move across borders must be at the center of any response to the climate crisis.
Note "populist" has been put in "". The ridiculousness of anti-refugee rhetoric calling itself "populist" is becoming increasingly apparent.
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The Green Wave continues in Austria:
greenworld.org.uk/article/austrian-green-party-wins-historic-share-vote-snap-election
The Austrian Green Party has received its highest ever share of the vote in a general election after winning 14 per cent of all votes cast in yesterday’s (29 September) snap election, raising the prospect of the party entering into a coalition with the victorious centre-right Austrian People's Party (ÖVP).
The Greens 10.2 per cent rise from the last election in 2017 has seen the party go from having zero seats in the National Council to 23, after previously missing the four per cent minimum threshold to qualify for seats in 2017.
The Greens’ share of 14 per cent put the party it in fourth place behind the ÖVP on 37.1 per cent, Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) on 21.7 per cent, and the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) on 16.1 per cent.
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Results show that support for the FPÖ has fallen by a third following the Ibiza scandal, in contrast to the increase in votes for the Greens, perhaps reflecting the surge in support for Green Parties across Europe, due to increasing concern over climate change.
The Green success has brought the party lots of cause to celebrate and the potential for a coalition with the ÖVP could see environmental issues brought to the forefront of Austrian politics. However, support for a union is divided within the Green Party, with some members unsure of the conservative social policies and wary of Kurz’s previous alliance with the far-right.
Speaking to Ruptly at the party’s headquarters, Green candidate Sibylle Hamann, said: "Our positions are clear, we are standing for a radical change in the Austrian climate politics. We want social fairness and radical transparency and control. Whoever wants to do this with us and wants to achieve it with us is more than welcome. If it will be Sebastian Kurz, it's up to him."
I agree with this approach. Greens need to demonstrate how much more they can do in government (even as minor coalition partners) to further energize people to support them long-term, including with a view to eventually making them major coalition partners.
Further analysis:
en.rfi.fr/environment/20190930-thunberg-effect-climate-worries-help-revive-austrias-greens
The Greens’ revival comes just two years after the party was booted out of parliament after failing to win so much as a seat. It also follows EU parliamentary elections in May – during which green parties across the bloc enjoyed their strongest showing yet.
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For Quentin Genard, from the Brussels-based environmental thinktank E3G, the results in Austria add to growing evidence that environmental concerns are reaching the top of Europe’s political agenda. “Austria not an isolated case – far from it,” he says.
“This is part of a wider trend … Green issues and environmentally friendly parties are getting a lot of traction at the moment – largely because people on the street calling for climate action sends a powerful message to policymakers.”
At the very least, Greens should aim to overtake far-right parties. This has not yet been successful:
slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/austria-freedom-party-far-right-election.html
The real takeaway from Sunday’s election is the incredible resilience of the FPÖ, which does not bode well for those thinking that the far right will cease to be a factor in European politics in the decades ahead.
The FPÖ promotes itself as the chief protector of Austrian identity and social welfare, both under siege by an influx of foreigners. Once untouchable in mainstream Austrian politics, it formed a government with Kurz’s center-right party after its impressive showing in 2017. Its most recent fall from grace is less a sign of voters turning away from the far right than the result of very specific—and likely temporary—circumstances.
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Nonetheless, the future will be brighter for the FPÖ than what many currently suspect.
Sunday’s election showed that the FPÖ has expanded its core support from 10 percent in 2002 to 15 or 16 percent in 2019. Under the leadership of Strache, supported by a core team consisting of members of German nationalist fraternities called Burschenschaften, the once-divided party developed a unified far-right, populist message. Despite the ongoing fights over style and personal behavior, there are no longer ideological differences within the party.
At its heart, the FPÖ remains a populist opposition party that will continue to capture the sentiments of many of those who feel like they have “lost” due to globalization. Promoting its particular brand of Heimat identity politics, the party will keep on playing on the fears of a large segment of Austrian society regarding illegal immigration and its impact on the pensions, as well as the health care systems and job security of Austrians. The party will be helped by a perceived inability of the other parties to address these “politically incorrect” issues. Simplified, populist slogans rather than concrete policy proposals were what made the party appealing in the first place. Consequently, following the dismal results on Sunday, the FPÖ leadership was quick to announce that it will assume its traditional role as an opposition party and not seek a new coalition government with the ÖVP. While this position may possibly change in the coming months, the FPÖ will without a doubt be able to attract many a disgruntled voter unhappy with the current state of affairs once the current scandals blow over.
It would not be at all out of place for Greens to start building a paramilitary wing for the express purpose of preparing to fight the far-right physically.
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The Green Wave is even (to our enemies' annoyance) partially mitigating what would otherwise have been total normalization of cruelty towards refugees in Denmark:
vdare.com/articles/moral-of-denmark-disaster-the-left-hates-the-west
the SDP had voted with the coalition led by Venestre (translates as “Left”, but actually center-right conservatives) to ban the burka and niqab, seize jewelry from refugees (on the theory that if someone is receiving welfare, they should not have jewelry worth thousands of dollars ), process asylum-seekers outside Europe, and cap non-Western immigration. But in order to form a “Left Bloc” coalition—with Greens and Socialists, who favor Denmark’s wholesale destruction—immigration policies are now officially to be “softened.”
During the election, Frederiksen pledged focus on “repatriation” rather than “integration.” But this has now changed to a desire to “improve conditions for families of rejected asylum-seekers and recommence accepting refugees under the UN’s quota system.” A plan to house asylum-seekers on an uninhabited island in the Baltic Sea has also been revoked [Denmark’s new government softens line on migration, By Emma Wallis, Info Migrants, July 8, 2019]. And the Left Block coalition has also overturned what they now claim is a “silly” law mandating that you had to live in Denmark for nine years before you could claim citizenship [Denmark Removes “Silly” Requirement for Citizenship Forms, The Local, September 27, 2019].