How Electoral Tactics Are Separating the Green Party from Its Ethics…
The Green Party was founded not just as a political vehicle, but as a principled response to the intertwined ecological, social, and moral crises of our time. It offered an invitation to reimagine politics, not as a contest for domination, but as a space of stewardship, participation, and care.
Yet in recent years, as electoral ambitions have grown, there are signs that the tactical imperatives of gaining and holding political power are beginning to erode this ethical foundation.
Electoral logic is inherently adversarial. It encourages message discipline, voter segmentation, and the identification of ‘wedge issues’ that can secure marginal gains. Success within this logic often demands strategic ambiguity, image management, and the pursuit of short-term wins over long-term transformation. While such tactics may increase vote share or seats won, they also risk transforming the party into what it once sought to challenge: a political actor driven more by pragmatism than principle, more by reaction than reflection.
Nowhere is this tension more evident than in the increasing willingness of some candidates to downplay radical policies in order to appeal to ‘soft’ voters, or to centre campaigns around local grievances rather than systemic transformation. There is a growing pressure to behave as mainstream politicians do, to speak in soundbites, avoid controversy, and prioritise electability over ecological truthfulness or moral clarity. In doing so, the party risks becoming a parody of itself: advocating for ecological integrity while compromising the deeper cultural and spiritual shifts such integrity demands.
This drift is not simply a matter of strategy; it is a philosophical divergence.
To frame politics as a battlefield where tactical cunning triumphs is to endorse a consequentialist ethic, where ends justify means, and moral considerations are subordinate to electoral calculus. But the ethic at the heart of the Green movement has always been one of care, coherence, and attunement. It calls for right relationship with the Earth, with others, and with future generations; a relationship that cannot be faked, marketed, or delayed until the next election.
Indeed, as Joan Tronto argues, care is not merely a private virtue but a political orientation, an ongoing attentiveness to needs, vulnerabilities, and interdependencies. Similarly, the process philosophy of Whitehead and others reminds us that all systems, including political ones, are dynamic, relational, and co-creative. From this perspective, the means are not separate from the ends. They are the ends, in germinal form. If the Green Party abandons its way of being in the world in order to win, then it has already lost something essential.
The process we use to get to the future IS the future we get.
What is needed perhaps, is not an abandonment of the political field, but a reclaiming of the party’s distinctiveness within it. This means resisting the seductions of slick campaign tactics that flatten complexity and compromise values.
It means crafting a politics that is slower, deeper, and more dialogical; a politics of presence rather than performance. And it means welcoming those willing to stand not just for something, but as something: embodiments of a different ethic, a different culture, a different future.
The choice before the Green Party is not simply between being idealistic or realistic. It is between being ethically alive or tactically undead. If we are to resist becoming yet another party chasing the hollow prize of influence, we must stay rooted in the living soil of our founding values, listening to the Earth, to each other, and to the silence between applause.
Mike Chitty
2025
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