Green Parties have taken very odd tacks, especially in countries where they haven't been rendered an irrelevant force by FPTP. Typically (especially in the case of the oldest and most entrenched Green parties) you have an odd issue emerging, with an increasingly "pro-status quo" middle-class voter base, but a leftist (or at least strongly SJW) cadre with the leadership normally tacking towards the wing stressing government participation and, well, centrism. Let's look at the recent machinations of some prominent Greens:
- New Zealand: has this year been content to be a sort of annex of Labour, subject to the same "fiscal responsibility" rules as them. So they will "challenge neoliberalism" as much as Ardern's Labour, which is to say probably not.
- Australia: has been caught in a huge internal schism with its centrist environmental wing and the leftists based around NSW, which the former seem to have won. Di Natale seem to be aping the centrism of the late Democrats.
- Germany: is being absorbed into the Merkel machine, in what will probably be a very economically right government. (In fact, just as the SPD is the textbook case study for how the original social democrats coped with compromise; the German Greens are a good study in how the New Left and the Establishment found common ground)
- France: imploded into a hundred pieces during the Hollande Presidency, and prominent members were in Melenchon, Hamon and Macron camps during the election. (The previously dicused leftist cadre with a middle class base come into play here, and is a key part of why the Greens under performed in 2012 with Joly).
There are several big problems. The biggest is that environmentalism (and other New Left causes) are no longer a unique selling point. Almost all parties of the left and centre have started to invade that niche, and left the Greens fighting for a place that will satigy their voters and cadre alike. Here the Austrian Greens seemed to make a bet that, well, "SJW" issues would be a good way to solve the dilemma, but it didn't fundamentally work.
Regardless, I am saddened by the loss of the Greens because I never think it is good to lose a voice from the centre left, and even if they were "naive" in parliament, it is very rarely a good idea for everybody in parliament to speak from the same voice.
There are plenty of examples of Green Parties still doing well though, even if you want to discount the success of GroenLinks in Holland and the fact that Left-Green might very well lead the next government in Iceland.
The two Belgian Green parties seem to be holding up fairly well; and the Swiss ones have had their best year since the split with the GreenLiberals.
In all those cases though, I think the Greens have done well at least in part by way of staying in very much as opposition parties, and generally not approaching the establishment too closely.
Looking at where Greens have stalled or fallen - France being the stand out example here - but all the others apply as well - there has always been an element of the Greens being co-opted into the establishment and diluting their credentials.
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