Forty years ago this spring, an eloquent, passionate, young American-educated German named Petra Kelly helped to launch the Green movement that swept first West Germany and then much of Western Europe. Kelly was one of those naturally charismatic politicians who drew supporters from a broad sweep of German voters: left and right, young and old.

By the mid-’80s Die Gruenen were eating into both the German Social Democrats’ and the Christian Democrats’ base. A decade later they were sharing power at the provincial level in Germany. Tragically, Kelly was murdered when she was only 44. The Green movement flatlined in the early part of this century, only to regain momentum with the rise of the climate crisis in recent years.

Before her death the rapidly growing Green Party was fraught with fierce internal debates between those who wanted to govern, and those who refused to compromise on an agenda that was fiscally and politically impossible. The two camps, one dubbed the “fundamentalists” and the other the “realists” broke the momentum of their early years. Petra Kelly was a “fundi” herself, and became estranged from the party she helped to found, as the “realos” gradually took over.

It is a cautionary tale for today’s Canadian Greens. The Trudeau Liberals are seen as climate failures by many younger voters in B.C. and Ontario. The NDP is seen by many of them as less likely to be able to deliver change, even if they are better on climate policy. The Greens may therefore have their best federal election ever. They may even come to hold the balance of power federally, as they do now in B.C.

Andrew Weaver, the professor turned B.C. Green leader, and his two caucus colleagues have painfully discovered there is a discipline to power, one that demands painful choices from those comfortably anchored in ideological purity. As George Marchais, the giant of French Communism said about his role in the Mitterand Socialist government, “Each day I must eat snakes….”

It is easy to envision an adroit squeeze play by a shakily re-elected Justin Trudeau, or Andrew Scheer as the prime minister of any minority government, inflicting such snakes on the burgeoning Greens. Set up a vote of confidence early in the new Parliament based on a decades long, sharply rising carbon pricing agenda, locked in combination with setting the first shovels in the ground on TMX. If the Greens vote yes they will enrage their base. Vote no, and they defeat the government, and they are into a snap election which threatens annihilation.

The climate crisis is a painful irritation for an already wobbly federal government. But they have a short-term trump: “A Green vote means a Scheer government.” For the NDP the threat is more existential. Most European social democratic parties, bobbing and weaving, co-operated with or tried to clobber the Greens. Both strategies lead to more fragmentation of political loyalties, and a steady weakening of the traditional parties’ dominance.

B.C. Premier John Horgan and Jagmeet Singh are juggling, positioning themselves as “climate campaigners who understand the realities of power and the economy,” without being dubbed climate disappointers. Their strategic goal is to unite social justice and climate. Not easy.

For Elizabeth May to continue to push herself and her party into ever more dismissive and hard-edged rejection of any compromise with the resource sector may be great politics in the short term. But most Canadians know that theirs is a nation built on those industries. Weaning them off their massive carbon emission loads is a project of decades not days.

If the Green base grows, many newcomers will not support increasingly more fierce attacks on mining, forestry, automobiles, and the oil and gas sector as the path to victory and change.

A larger Green base, coming off a reasonably successful federal election, will be a difficult beast to manage. Party-building and brokerage politics have never been May’s forte. Hungry new potential leaders will be organizing around her. Helping the party navigate between its fundis and realos, without leading to damaging splits will take political mastery.

The woman who invented the German Green movement failed at it, and it broke her heart and nearly broke her party, and Elizabeth May is no Petra Kelly.

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RS Robin V. Sears is a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group and was an NDP strategist for 20 years. He is a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @robinvsears

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