The European Green Party (EGP) has elected heavyweights German Terry Reintke and Dutch Bas Eickhout as their EU elections lead candidates. A push to include southern and eastern candidates in the leadership failed during the party’s electoral congress in Lyon on 2-4 February.
Against the prospect of major losses ahead of EU elections – dropping from 75 seats in 2019 to 51 according to Euractiv’s projections – the European Greens have preferred to play it safe with two well-known, established political figures with strong political careers.
German MEP Terry Reintke, co-president of the Greens group in the European Parliament, was elected in the first round with 55,2% votes.
Dutch MEP Bas Eickhout, also the Greens’ lead candidate in the 2019 EU elections and in Parliament for 15 years, was elected in the second round with 57% votes.
“People are scared, it’s a safe choice,” a delegate told Euractiv before the vote, as the result was widely anticipated.
As for the two other contenders, largely unknown for national delegations, Italian Benedetta Scuderi will stay in her role as co-spokesperson of the Young European Greens while Elina Pinto stays on as the lead candidate for The Progressives party in Latvia.
Enlargement strategy not reflected
As Euractiv gathered in the previous hours to the vote, however, some national delegations would have preferred to pick a southern or eastern candidate, reflecting the European Green Party “enlargement strategy” in the last 5 years.
Since 2019 the EGP has welcomed nine new members while two more were accepted during the electoral congress in Lyon, in efforts to expand the party’s reach and to strengthen the green movement in the east and south of Europe, geographical areas with little green presence.
“The biggest problem is it’s Germany and the Netherlands, it’s not very geographically balanced and diverse. But I think we’ve also shown that we can campaign for the entire Europe. And the message that the Greens are expanding to the south and the east, which is happening … we can bring that [to the campaign]”, MEP and Greens’ lead candidate Bas Eickhout told Euractiv.
“But it’s true that the two of us are not representing that very well,” he added.
Given that the votes were assigned to national delegations based on the political weight within their country, eastern and southern delegations had little chance to rally enough votes for their preferred pick.
Out of the 11 new additions, five are from Eastern Europe and six from Southern Europe, but the wide majority are very small forces with barely any political weight in their respective countries.
Do no trust polls, Reintke says
Wary of the polls, Reintke stressed during a press conference that in the 2019 elections, the Greens were projected to plummet, but then “we became the biggest group that we ever were.”
”It is true maybe we are not polling as high as we had a result in 2019, but we are welcoming more and more political parties in the European Green Party (…) and with this reinforced geographical diversity (…) with more support from the East and the South especially, we hope that we can not only consolidate on a high level but become even bigger,” she added.
Only 3 of the new parties are projected to make it into the European Parliament after the EU elections with one seat each, according to projections: Latvia’s The Progressives, Croatia’s Mozemo with one seat too and Spain’s Catalonia in Common.
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