Anti-corruption campaigner Eva Joly looks likely to be the Greens' presidential candidate in 2012. The Norwegian-born European parliamentarian appears to have beaten rival candidate Nicolas Hulot.

 

"/> Anti-corruption campaigner Eva Joly looks likely to be the Greens' presidential candidate in 2012. The Norwegian-born European parliamentarian appears to have beaten rival candidate Nicolas Hulot.

 

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Eva Joly likely to head Green ticket in 2012

Anti-corruption campaigner Eva Joly looks likely to be the Greens' presidential candidate in 2012. The Norwegian-born European parliamentarian appears to have beaten rival candidate Nicolas Hulot.

 

Published: 11 July 2011 14:16 CEST
Eva Joly likely to head Green ticket in 2012
Marie-Lan Nguyen

When the results of the second round of voting are made public on Tuesday, a high-ranking party member told Reuters, Joly will likely enjoy a solid victory — probably “60 – 40, or even more,” said the source.

In the first round of voting, Joly, a former fraud prosecutor and tireless scourge of the French establishment, failed to get the support she needed against three rivals, TV personality Hulot, anti-nuclear activist Stephane Lhomme and Henri Stoll, a mayor in Alsace.

Lhomme and Stoll were knocked out after the first round, and observers said many of their votes went to Joly in the second round, since Hulot was considered by many not far enough to the left.

Joly, 67, is best know for her role as an investigating judge in the eight-year fraud investigation of oil giant Elf in the 1990s, which rocked France’s political and business elites. Her work on that case brought her repeated threats and she was often shadowed by bodyguards.

She is seen by many Greens as being firmly positioned on the left side of the political spectrum and has been a fierce critic of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his government. Her campaign for the candidacy was solid, observers said.

“On issues of injustice, downward mobility and the oligarchy, Eva is credible,” said Noël Mamère, a Green party parliamentarian.

Her rival Hulot, on the other hand, aroused the suspicion of hard-core supporters with his financial ties to big companies like EDF and L’Oréal.

Joly was born in Norway and moved to Paris at the age of 20 to work as an au pair. Later, she worked as a secretary while studying law at night. She is a relative newcomer to politics, having been elected to the European Parliament in 2009.            

The 2006 French film L’Ivresse du pouvoir, or “Comedy of Power,” is loosely based on her.

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GREENS

ANALYSIS: Greens face dashed hopes – and new leverage in German vote aftermath

With growing fears about global warming, deadly floods linked to climate change and a new political landscape as Angela Merkel leaves the stage, it should have been the German Greens' year.

Published: 26 September 2021 20:47 CEST
Updated: 26 September 2021 23:09 CEST
ANALYSIS: Greens face dashed hopes - and new leverage in German vote aftermath
The Greens co-leaders Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck at the Greens' election event in Berlin. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Christoph Soeder

After launching their campaign for Sunday’s general election in the spring with a youthful, energetic candidate in Annalena Baerbock, the sky seemed to be the limit – perhaps even taking the chancellery.

But although Germany has never seen an election campaign so focused on the climate crisis, the party turned in a third-place finish behind the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), leading the race by a whisker, and the outgoing Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats.

However Baerbock, 40, proved popular with young voters and her party with around 14 percent strongly improved on its 8.9 percent score from four years ago.

It is now widely expected to play a key kingmaker role in the coalition haggling to form a government.

“We wanted to win the chancellery, unfortunately that wasn’t possible,” Baerbock said late Sunday.

“We made mistakes but we have a clear mandate for our country and we will respect it. This country needs a government that will fight global warming – that’s the voters’ message.”

A fateful series of missteps by Baerbock as well as a perhaps more tepid appetite for change among Germans than first hoped saw the Greens’ initial
lead fizzle by early summer.

LIVE: Centre-left Social Democrats edge ahead in German election results

It never recovered.

“It was a historic chance for the Greens,” Der Spiegel wrote in a recent cover story on Baerbock’s “catastrophic mistakes”.

“The Greens stand like no other party for the big issue of our time but that doesn’t begin to ensure that they win majorities. They need a broader base.”

Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Kay Nietfeld

‘Shameless and complacent’

Baerbock captured the imagination of Germans when she announced her candidacy in April, and her promise of a fresh start after 16 years of Merkel rocketed the party to the top of the polls.

But by this week, even her co-party leader Robert Habeck admitted that the Greens had been forced to set their sights lower.

“The distance to the chancellery has grown quite large of course,” he told the daily Die Welt.

“We saw that our political rivals didn’t have much interest in change and kept saying ‘Yes, yes, climate protection is nice but it shouldn’t be too expensive’.

Without recognising that not protecting the climate is the most expensive answer.”

He said the Greens’ rivals “want to continue the Merkel era in the campaign, as shameless and complacent as possible”.

‘Hold all the cards’

Critics sought to portray the Greens as a “prohibition party” that would lead to rises in petrol, electricity and air ticket prices.

The party has advocated stopping coal energy by 2030 instead of the current 2038, and wants production of combustion engine cars to end from the same year.

While Germans pay lip service to climate protection, a recent poll for the independent Allensbach Institute found 55 percent oppose paying more to ensure it.

“The Germans have decades of prosperity and growth behind them – there were hardly limits and that burned its way deep into the public consciousness,” Spiegel said.

“Doing without is linked to dark times – triggering memories among the very old of (wartime) turnip soup and alienation among the young used to having more and more to choose from.”

On the other hand climate activists, who rallied in their hundreds of thousands across Germany on Friday, said even the Greens’ ambitious programme would fall short in heading off climate-linked disasters in the coming decades.   

Meanwhile Baerbock’s relative inexperience was laid bare under the hot campaign spotlight.

“She overestimated her abilities and then she doubted herself – not a good combination,” Ursula Münch, director of the Academy for Political Education
near Munich, told AFP.

“She should have been more patient and waited until next time.”

Despite the sobering outcome, the Greens nevertheless look well-placed to make the most of a junior role, under either SPD candidate Olaf Scholz or the

Armin Laschet, political analyst Karl-Rudolf Korte told ZDF public television as the results came in.

He said “all eyes” would be on the Greens and the other potential kingmaker, the pro-business Free Democrats, who came in fourth place with about 11.5 percent.

“Those two parties hold all the cards,” he said.

By Deborah COLE

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