My Dear Friends from Our Green Family, I Would Hereby Like to Express

My dear friends from our Green family, I would hereby like to express my will to re-run for the post of the EGP Secretary General. Nearly a year has passed since I was elected into the position, at our Autumn Council in Istanbul. Back then, I mainly based my candidature on two points: - My knowledge of our Green family, after having been a member of the EGP Committee for more than two years. - My experience in party work from an institutional and a governmental perspective, as a member of Initiativa per Catalunya Verds (ICV), the Catalonian Green Party. Thanks to the trust you gave me in Istanbul, I can now add the accumulated experience that I have gained during this year as the EGP Secretary General. Parallel to my will for re-election is the fruit of the work I have done during my time in office. Already in Istanbul, I proposed two main aims that I would prioritise as Secretary General: - To promote the political agenda of the EGP. We have the ambition of being an active protagonist in European Politics, together with the Green Group in the European Parliament. - To guarantee the necessary services in order to strengthen our Member Parties, taking into account the diversity, plurality and complexity of our family. In cooperation with our partners: The Green Group in the European Parliament, FYEG and the Global Greens. Furthermore, through smooth daily management. We have tried our best to demonstrate a strong political profile during the worst crisis that Europe has faced until now: The economic crisis and the situation in Greece. Launching a common appeal and outlining our rejection of austerity policies, and adopting a Committee resolution that is anti-austerity at our last Council in Zagreb. Also with regard the humanitarian crisis that occurred and is nowadays filling newspapers headlines we have shown a high political profile on the need to change asylum and refugee policies. We have launched our common campaign on climate change, with the aim of providing our Members with a useful tool in order to campaign and engage ground activism for the deserved climate policy that should be agreed in the COP 21 meeting to be held in Paris later this year. Following the priority set out for 2015, to re-launch the local level, we have been investing a lot of effort into organising our Green Cities Conference, to be held in Helsinki on 25 September 2015. We are working to be able to provide a platform to share, advertise and encourage our Green local councillors daily political action. Showing how greens can deliver and how our presence in cities decision making process makes a different for a better world. With regard to my proposal for strengthening the cooperation and networking among our Member Parties, we have many plans on mind. We have started by re-organising the resources in our office, in order to allocate an assistant devoted to Member Parties, who is closely involved in providing the support that we must deliver. We have launched the internship programme, with the aim of enhancing each other’s knowledge and experiences. With regard gender, we have been exploring the correlation between gender and climate change, and shaking up our Gender Network. We are also in the process of reforming our web presence and strengthening our communication policy. An organisational policy and an Electoral Strategy for the 2019 European Elections. We have committed ourselves to creating the best possible conditions for the Green family to face the next European elections in 2019. Of course, many things are still to come before 2019, but as of today, we can say that these elections will not be easy for the Greens. This is for the simple reason that our commitment to give a European dimension to the Elections, as we did in the 2014 campaign, clashes with the on going re-nationalisation of European politics. I am sure that we are swimming against the current but in favour of history. We are a major European political party. Complex, plural and asymmetrical, but an important player in a Europe that is going through difficulties and is full of uncertainties about its future. The basis for our political strategy should be to articulate, coordinate and strengthen the major current synergies: the EGP’s own ones and those of its partners, on a European level, and national level, and within our Member Parties. Our aim should be to create a virtuous circle that feeds back with shared policies, both at national and European levels. We are a party with strong asymmetries between our members. This is a reality we must face in order to overcome. Our strategy must drive through agreed priorities with our members. As I already said, in November 2014 in Istanbul, our "Green cooperative" must exploit the strengths and experiences of some of our Member Parties for the strengthening of others that are not in the best conditions. In 2017, we will host a combined EGP and Global Greens Congress. We will be 2 years ahead of European Parliament elections, and we must have our strategy defined and be ready to start our political campaign for 2019. Future challenges Over the next four years, Europe will have to decide whether it will move forward in its unity or keep its current trend of re-nationalisation. The Greek crisis has illustrated the failure of the Eurozone’s design, and the institutional inadequacies of the current Union. The lack of a proper economic policy in the Eurozone has been replaced by a more atavistic dialectic: Creditor countries versus debtor countries. The management of the Greek crisis and the stubbornness of austerity policies, demonstrably false, are undermining the public opinion’s support of the European process. Greece has highlighted the fragility of EU policy. Neither of Greece's problems will be solved with the agreement reached, and it is not only Greece that has problems in the Eurozone. Moreover, the UK’s announcement to hold a referendum in 2017 on their continued membership in the EU is not an encouraging sign for European integration. Anti-Europeanism is growing through political forces that embody the worst from our recent history. In each country the national withdrawal instinct takes its own form. We are facing a democratic, ecological and social battle. A battle that is being waged in the different national settings, but that we, Greens, are fighting on a European level, because we are the political actor with the greater capacity to transcend national scenarios and to give a European approach to conflict. One of our main aims is to re-launch the European project. To undo the road travelled so far would be a historic disaster. A supervised Europe led by the interests of one or another country has no future, because sooner or later the chain that links the current 28 states that form the Union will break. Do we have the answers to the challenges and problems of the present? Yes, we do! We will not allow the crisis to break down ecology from the political agenda. For the greens, the economical is not antagonistic to the ecological or to the social. The antagonistic thing to the social and environmental sustainability of our societies is not the economy, but certain models that are based on the exploitation of people and natural resources. We strongly believe that! We should try our best to communicate that Green proposals are a real response to the economic crisis, to job creation, and to the governance of the economy. Our Green narrative has a singular logic, the Green one, which suggests that the planet is the legacy left to us by our children and future generations, and that we must preserve it. The logic that says that nothing should be taken from nature that nature cannot restore. The logic that believes that the unique ecosystem that supports human life is our planet. That’s the essence of our Green New Deal! Every historic moment has its priority, its own accent. Ours is the crisis, to tackle unemployment and the economy. We need to tune-in with our citizens by finding the correct accent. Today, our narrative, our message, must be that we have a program to overcome the crisis, to create jobs based on sustainability. It is viable, and it requires information, communication and partnerships. I am not ignoring that there are false clichés that are stopping the Green message from becoming stronger, especially in the south. In many places we still have to overcome the notion that we are a barrier to progress. That we are more interested in the environment than in people. That environmentalism is typical of post-materialist societies because they are the only ones that can afford it. If there is a region where the Green agenda is most needed, it is the south. Every generation has its historical challenges, and ours is globalization. For Greens, globalisation is not a negative fact. We are still lacking higher levels of governance. But it is an opportunity to become responsible. And we are aware of our responsibilities. Our ambition should be to achieve the status of a decisive political actor on the European stage. And that ambition does correspond with our strengths and our capabilities. It is also true that we are still not ready in some countries. The Green alternative still needs to be strengthened, and we are planning to do so! We are already preparing ourselves to face 2019 in the best possible conditions. Despite our weaknesses in some countries, without ignoring them, at a European level we can gather sufficient critical mass to be influential political actors.

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