Reports just coming in show that the European Green party has picked Terry Reintke and Bas Eickhout as lead candidates to front its campaign ahead of elections in June that polls suggest will result in it losing seats.
Flanked by green banners bearing the word “courage”, the two MEPs, who were elected by delegates at a congress in Lyon on Saturday, said that they would stand up to the surge of the far right and fight for a more equal and ecological Europe.
Reintke, who is a German MEP who won 55% of the vote for lead female candidate, said she wanted to put social justice at the heart of the election campaign. She said: “I want us to speak to people who we are not yet speaking to.”
Eickhout, a Dutch MEP who won 57% of the vote for the second position, said he wanted to be an antidote to the far right. “We will stand for democracy, we will fight the fascists, and we will stand for your future.”
Recall that the Greens rode a wave of public support at the last elections in 2019 after students staged protests for climate action and a UN report found countries must hit net zero emissions by 2050 to keep the planet from heating 1.5°C (2.7°F).
As far-right parties have grown more popular, and the Greens have lost support in big countries such as Germany, delegates at the congress said they expected to shed some seats in the European parliament.
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Eickhout and Reintke – who have been MEPs since 2009 and 2014 respectively – told the Guardian they expected to outperform the polls but that it would be harder than at the previous election.
“Obviously we are facing challenges, where green policies are being attacked head on, but we are also finding our fighting spirit,” said Reintke, 36, who is co-president of the Green group in parliament. “It will be much more challenging,” said Eickhout, 47, who is vice-chair of the European parliament’s environment committee. But attacks by the conservatives and the far right need not be bad, he added. “The worst that can happen in a campaign is if they ignore you.”
A key question for the Green party is whether it would support the commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, the champion of the European Green Deal and heavyweight of the centre-right European People’s party, if she ran for a second term. The candidates declined to say what their support would cost her but Eickhout said that going back on the Green Deal could not be part of it.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
