Sprouting up across Europe in the early 1980s, Green Parties were styled as non-sectarian, refreshing alternatives to the largely Maoist revolutionary left of the 1970s, from which they drew many former members. These parties united frustrated sections of the radical left with activists from the ecological and feminist movements in what seemed like a promising alternative path to the dogmatism and verbal radicalism of the post-1968 upsurge.

In the United States, the country’s inherently restrictive electoral system has prevented the Greens from gaining any meaningful footholds in elected office, but the party has, whatever its faults, largely stuck to the radical ecological principles it adhered to at its founding.

Yet the German and Austrian Greens were able to enter their countries’ respective political systems by the late 1980s — and in the German case, even managed to join a governing coalition in 1998. Both parties have since shed their radical veneer in pursuit of political power and legitimacy. Their trajectories point towards the fundamental limitations of the “Green” political approach, suggesting that a set of floating policies decoupled from any durable social base or wider social vision prove an insufficient anchor for radical politics.