Narratives for the European Elections: How to counter populism with alternatives built on intrinsic values
hope-based communications
A strategy for social change. Five positive shifts for better narratives.
Note: This newsletter was first published on the hope-based Substack in January 16, 2024. The Events section was edited to share updated community announcements.
Since 2024 is a big election year, our January issues will focus on hope-based strategy during elections. Next week we will look at how activists in the Czech Republic helped defeat a populist candidate last year.
This week I will share extract from an article I've just published advising Green parties to embrace their values to offer a strong, inspiring alternative to populism and for right narratives across Europe. In it, I argue that the way to do this is built on a bold vision of change
You can read the full article here.
A New Green Wave of Hope
If they wish to set the agenda for the EU elections this June, Green parties cannot simply react to events and opponents, replicating right-wing narratives of fear and blame. A new Green wave needs new voices, values, and visions.
1. Hope offers alternatives
People need to see that change is possible. If people believe there is a way they can “get this done”, they are far more likely to roll up their sleeves and get behind bold policies welcoming newcomers or transforming their cities.
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other US Democrats put forward the Green New Deal, she released “Message from the future”, which looks back at the imagined roll-out of the policies, showing what society would look like and the role of everyday people in making it happen. The video ends with the message “We can be whatever we have the courage to see” – another lesson for politics from brain science that is commonplace in sport science.
This was an alternative, hopeful vision of the future as bold as Solarpunk, the movement that imagines a future where humanity lives in harmony with nature, as a counter to dystopian Cyberpunk. Green politics needs to be more like Solarpunk, because human beings have predictive brains: they need to visualise something before we can achieve it. But European politics right now offers little reason for hope.
A bolder Solarpunk politics would offer visions of a better future worth voting and campaigning for. In February 2023 the Green party showed Berlin citizens how their transport policy would change their neighbourhoods: more trees, more cycle lanes and pedestrian areas – but above all more community. This is a simple exercise that Green parties could carry out at European level: what would our societies look like with more freedom of movement, a perfect response to climate change, and more equality and racial justice?
The implication for this year’s EU elections is clear: Green parties need to talk about the ideas they want on the political agenda.
Rather than trying to win credibility by adopting, and focusing on, mainstream positions on issues like migration or foreign affairs, they should keep core green and progressive values top of mind.
2. Hope is radical
Green parties should make the case for their agenda by appealing to innate human values such as social justice
Narratives built on intrinsic values can convince Europeans that this election should be about empathy, our responsibility to care for each other, and shared humanity. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the importance of working together, of institutions that support international cooperation, and of policies built on care, mutual respect, and shared humanity.
The challenge for Green parties is to be as comfortable and effective at using values-based messaging
Green parties need to have faith that the majority of Europeans share their values, and the courage to stick to a new political vocabulary that reflects them.
Words like care, empathy, and love feel unwieldy and incongruous in the political space, but if used correctly, they have the power to change our political brains.
3. Hope is action
To reach more people, Green political activism should seek to channel the human hunger for connection
They can also activate so many of the intrinsic values that reinforce each other. For example, connection to nature can reinforce our support for social justice. The success of the UK birdwatching collective for people of colour Flock Together shows that to have lasting effect, good politics has to reach into daily life and make people feel agency and belonging.
These are kinds of stories activists in hope-based workshops identify when they imagine people acting on their values and vision: for example, diverse people coming together in green spaces or community centres.
Recommended by LinkedIn
It is up to Green parties to politically leverage the innate joy and passion for the natural world that many people also demonstrate in the online world (think of the emotional pull of animal videos, for example), just as the far right makes political capital from dark elements of the web such as conspiracy theories.
Crucially, it is action like holding a dinner for newcomers or birdwatching for local communities that brings new narratives to life in a way that messaging and talking points alone can never achieve.
Small actions can thus become politically powerful when they come to symbolise and reinforce values and ideas. This strategic imperative is also a deeply empowering message for political organisers, because it means everyone has some power to shape narratives with the stories they choose to focus on, and the stories they create with their actions.
Read the full article in the Green European Journal here.
Events
Activist Book Club
Still time to sign up for this month’s meeting where will talk about media reparations and movement journalism with Alicia Bell and Mandy Van Deven .
Rewire your mind, rewire your country
We are a couple months into the REWIRE incubator! Read Zsofia Banuta ’s substack about the program here.
Check out the great updates on the program at the Unhack Democracy page.
hopey, changey stuff
What’s making us hopeful
We crowdsourced some stories that made the hope-based community hopeful in 2023.
Melinda Zsolt: COP28 and the end of the fossil fuel era. For the first time, there is global cooperation on an issue that has been awaited for decades by climate change campaigners and all those who see, understand and feel the adverse effects of climate change in many areas of their lives. There has never been a similar coalition in the 28-year history of international negotiations on climate change. Cooperation between almost 200 countries around the world required hope and trust, which could create the moment for the renewal and strengthening of the climate change narratives and their integration into mainstream discourse.
Narratives about the fight against climate change also need to be renewed to enter the mainstream, so that the messages of the green movement become a fundamental concept.
Kerem Çiftçioğlu: In 2023, what gave me hope is a book called 'Stolen Attention', which talks about why we can't focus and what should be done to think deeply again. The author Johan Harri realizes the endemic nature of the human attention crisis. The source of hope for me is the interest in the book in Turkey, which I think may mark the beginning of a new activism that has not yet been named - an activism that is not satisfied with self-help measures and reclaims our attention in more foundational ways.
Sho Walker-Konno: Poland: since the elections in October, student activists who were resisting PiS and their 'LGBT-free zones' the last few years have reported that schools are newly emboldened to be safe for LGBT children, most visibly in resuming their 'Rainbow Fridays' initiative.
Mexico: abortion rights victory in the Supreme Court after a couple of years of the movement combining regional and national, strategic communication and strategic litigation tactics.
Quote of the week
“The people who suffer from injustice, who withstand daily insults to their dignity, who are marginalised, silenced, exploited, left to die or killed cannot afford to ask themselves if they have hope. They cling on to life, they try to cope, they fight. Their continuing struggle, whatever form it takes, cannot afford the loss of faith.” - Lea Ypi.