Who does the new right really fear? Quinn Slobodian’s study of the populist, nativist right we know today traces it back to the surprising anxieties of neoliberals at the end of the cold war. Instead of celebrating the collapse of communism and glory years of the liberal market economy, a new threat surfaced: environmentalists. Together with the new social movements and stubbornly generous welfare states, this assemblage represented, for the right, a disturbing mutation of collectivism. It risked rekindling the popular power that the dismantling of trade unions and other institutions of the organised left was supposed to have extinguished. ‘Having fought back a red tide,’ warned the Mont Pelerin Society of free market intellectuals, ‘we are now in danger of being engulfed by a green one’.
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While the post-war settlement was safely behind them, the new threat seemed to combine the desire for individual self-realisation and hedonism – which neoliberal consumerism had captured – with the instincts for democracy and solidarity that characterised socialism. It is no coincidence that in 1989, just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Green Party polled an extraordinary 15 per cent in the UK’s European elections – a breakthrough not matched for decades. Estimates from the May 2026 local elections put Green Party support above that level, helping revive some of the right’s old fears. Reactions over the past year have been telling: it’s been easier for many commentators to write off the party’s new eco-populist direction as ‘reheated Corbynism’ than to grapple with the prospect that ecology and socialism might, in fact, be brought together.
Across the divide
The historic dividing line between green politics and socialism – drawn, for example, in Jonathon Porritt’s Seeing Green (1984) – was on the issue of economic growth. Its determined, often single-minded pursuit on both the left and the right of politics was enough to persuade many Greens that they belonged to neither camp. But many advocates of ‘degrowth’ – better framed as a democratic and social project of both limits and radical abundance – are now ardent ecosocialists.
Meanwhile, many socialists have become more critical of growth. James Meadway, former economics adviser to John McDonnell, notes the question ‘wasn’t even considered’ in Corbyn’s team. Now, he says, ‘The question isn’t do we choose to degrow, but what we do with degrowth, now that it’s going to happen.’ The question hasn’t yet filtered through to the Labour Party. Prime Minister Andy Burnham promises ‘good growth in every postcode’. If he achieves it, the most generous scenario will be growth not as the goal, but as a side product of Treasury-obstructed public intervention in an economy starved of investment.
From writers like Jason Hickel to breakthrough socialist politicians like Zohran Mamdani and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the bringing together of ecology, liberation, affordability and economic planning is emerging as a coherent political programme that stretches well beyond Green parties. Its utopian horizons lie less in an industrial explosion of productive capacities than in affordable necessities, free time, public luxury and lively communities – the politics of buen vivir. Eco-populism is the latest attempt, as Alyssa Battistoni puts it, to stealthily identify a base of social power for climate politics.
Organising cultures
The absence of an organic social base with environmentalism as a minority interest has hampered climate politics until now. In Inventing the Future, a formative book for the Corbynist left, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams launched a brutal critique of ‘folk politics’ – a set of ideas and practices which rejected the structures, planning and leadership needed to make collective action happen. Green electoralists have taken on this lesson. The party’s ‘target to-win’ strategy is, at its core, about discipline. At the same time, however, overarching political strategy flows loosely in the wind and a mild culture of individual voluntarism persists.
In Rules for Revolutionaries, Bernie Sanders campaigners Becky Bond and Zack Exley implore organisers to ‘ask big’, and to distribute the work but centralise the plan. How many local parties can say that between elections, specific asks are put to specific people (who are then held to account), and the plan put before members is ambitious, clear and inspiring? A Green Party that learns from the mass character and gargantuan achievements of socialist movements, which treats organising more as an imperative for our own shared interests than a gift to others – heeding legendary union organiser Jane McAlevey’s advice: ‘don’t say thank you’ – might have a better chance of turning 200,000 paper members into activists for life.
Political office is a site of power, to be leveraged
These cultural lessons carry political advantages too. Newly elected Green councils – several of which are not coincidentally run by former Labour councillors – are showing it is possible to take much greater ownership of the national platform councils have to challenge central government, particularly on austerity and trans rights. Elected representatives need not be empty vessels for communities, naive victims of other parties’ power plays, or wasting time building deferential consensus with obstructive officers. Political office is a site of power, to be leveraged.
Of course, synthesis is about the best of both. The benefit of being pluralists is that there is no rigid theoretical structure from which all of our positions are derived. Evacuees from Labour to the Greens can enjoy genuine debates about policy, strategy and candidate selections knowing that the outcome is not yet predetermined by whoever got more of their people into the room. We can foster a culture that is, as the late Michael Brooks put it, ‘ruthless to institutions and systems, but kind and empathetic to people’.
One great irony of the UK’s first past the post electoral system is that while it has stymied smaller parties, it also forces majoritarian considerations to the fore. Unlike the proportional systems that allow smaller left and green parties to survive on low vote shares and join coalitions elsewhere, the Green Party of England and Wales is obliged to win pluralities of the vote to stay afloat. With the UK’s two-party duopoly breaking open, Greens here – until now isolated from the political pressures that have transformed our ‘mature’ sister parties in Europe – must keep speaking to the country at large.
An enduring political subject will only be found through the mass, patient organisation of fragmented workplaces, isolated neighbours, fragile communities. This will be hard. Luckily, an eco-populist electoral project has given us over 200,000 members to do it.
