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 they would stand up to the surge of the far right and fight for a more equal and ecological Europe.
Reintke, 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.”
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.
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.
The Green Deal was a “big relief” because it put environment at the core of politics for the first time, said Eickhout. But while industry had realised that change was needed, politicians were dropping the ball, he added: “There I get furious.”
The candidates also said they would balance engaging their core supporters with selling the social benefits of policies to new voters. Climate activists in countries where the Greens are part of the national government have often been left frustrated by compromises made with bigger coalition partners.
“It’s not that activists are against compromise, it’s that they don’t want foul compromise,” said Reintke. But after negotiations, she added, the Greens would still have to convince voters that “it’s better for us to be at the table and take the decisions with the others as a compromise, rather than being on the sidelines and maybe having the right ideology but not influencing policies.”
Reintke and Eickhout beat Benedetta Scuderi, an Italian from the Young European Greens, and Elīna Pinto, lead candidate of the Latvian Progressives party. On stage at the congress, the candidates highlighted their personalities and backgrounds more than differences in policies.
Reintke also said the Greens needed to engage communities who felt angry and apathetic without adopting the tactics of the far right. He said: “They want this diffuse anger, they don’t want to solve any of the problems.”
She added: “Confronting this anger, making it into something constructive, but also looking at the apathy that a lot of people feel, and how we can turn that into something positive – that is a challenge we are facing in the election that I want to take on.”
