Ecolo

Ecolo, officially Écologistes Confédérés pour l'organisation de luttes originales is a French-speaking political party in Belgium based on green politics. The party is active in Wallonia and the Brussels-Capital Region.
Ecolo's Flemish equivalent is Groen; the two parties maintain close relations with each other.

Name

Ecolo is officially a backronym for Écologistes Confédérés pour l'organisation de luttes originales "Confederated Ecologists for the Organisation of Original Struggles", but is really just short for écologistes, French for environmentalists.

History

Ecolo's origins can be traced to the 1970s. In 1971 Paul Lannoye left the Walloon Rally to found the party Démocratie Nouvelle. DN's 1973 manifesto called for a decentralised form of federalism in Belgium with a major role for popular initiatives and an economy which prioritises satisfying people's basic needs and self-cultivation over unnecessary and environmentally damaging consumption, themes which formed a major part of Ecolo's message during the first half of the 1980s. In the mid-1970s DN members made contact with environmentalists in Wallonia, as well as Friends of the Earth's sections in France and the United States, leading to the establishment of a Belgian section of the movement in 1976. DN formed an electoral list, Combat Pour l'Ecologie et l'Autogestion, to contest that year's local elections in Namur, scoring 1.9 percent of the vote.
Multiple ecology lists contested the 1977 and 1978 Belgian general elections in Wallonia. In 1979 the Europe-Ecologie list contested the first European Parliament elections in Francophone Belgium, with Lannoye at its head and 13 of the 17 candidates being Friends of the Earth members. The list's platform advocated a Europe of the Regions, referenda, a green economy, Third World solidarity, nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from NATO. It scored 5.1 percent in the French-speaking electoral college, including 7.7 percent in the arrondissement of Namur and 22 percent in St. Vith.
Ecolo was established as a permanent party in March 1980. Although several other ecological lists contested the 1981 Belgian general election in Wallonia, Ecolo was the only one to contest all constituencies across French-speaking Belgium. It achieved 5.9 percent and 3.1 percent of the vote in Wallonia and the Brussels region respectively, electing two Representatives and three Senators, whilst in the concurrent provincial elections four councillors were elected in Liège Province, three won seats in Namur, and one each gained seats in Hainaut Province and Luxembourg.
The following year the party won 7.1 percent and 75 seats in municipal elections. The party won six seats on Liège city council, holding the balance of power between the left and right alliances. They made a coalition agreement with the left, securing three of the council's eleven schepen and commitments to increasing public participation, incorporating quality of life concerns into urban planning, divestment from nuclear power and ending political patronage. Whilst some gains were made regarding participation and nuclear divestment, other policies were thwarted by the city's parlous financial state and the council's lack of power compared to the national government and private developers.
In the 1984 European elections, Ecolo achieved 9.9 percent in the Francophone electoral college and elected François Roelants du Vivier as an MEP. In the 1985 Belgian general election the party scored 6.5 percent in Wallonia, increasing their number of Representatives to five and maintaining their share of Senate seats.
Despite this electoral success, tensions within the party spilled out into the open in 1986 after a motion proposed by Lannoye to professionalise the party executive was voted down, resulting in him and two allies withdrawing their candidacies for the executive. The same year Ecolo Representative Olivier Deleuze resigned his parliamentary seat and party membership alongside two senior party officials after the party executive voted in favour of a proposal put forward by Lannoye for Ecolo members of the Walloon Regional Council to vote in support of Liberal Reformist Party colleagues on specific issues in exchange for support from the latter for some Ecolo proposals. Some members objected to the proposal as it involved cooperation with a party of the right, whilst others felt that Lannoye and his allies has strong-armed the executive into voting for the motion. The situation was resolved when the executive voted to approve Lannoye's professionalisation proposal, he was re-elected to the executive, and the Liberals rejected Ecolo's cooperation proposal. However, a spate of resignations from the party among elected representatives caused financial problems, as the vast majority of the party's budget came from public funding including taking a cut of elected officials' salaries.
Although the party scored the same share of the vote in the 1987 Belgian general election as in the 1985 federal election, they lost two Representatives whilst retaining their three Senate seats.
Ecolo was part of the 1999 Verhofstadt I Government, but withdrew from the coalition before the 2003 general election, which saw it lose nearly two thirds of its 14 federal parliamentary seats in the face of a resurgent Socialist Party. The party made quite a comeback, however, in the 2007 general election, though failing to match the peak popularity it had enjoyed in 1999. In the general election of 10 June 2007, the party won eight out of 150 seats in the Chamber of Representatives and two out of the 40 directly elected seats in the Senate.
In the 2010 elections, the party again won eight seats in the Chamber of Representatives and two in the Senate.

Political views

Ecolo is a political party that promotes sustainable development policies, aimed at preserving the environment and combating climate change, in the interests of current and future generations. The party seeks to create a more democratic and inclusive society by encouraging new political practices and strengthening citizen participation in a model of participatory democracy.

Electoral positioning

During the 2019 election campaign, the RePresent research centre — composed of political scientists from five universities — studied the electoral programmes of Belgium's thirteen main political parties. This study classified the parties on two "left-right" axes, from "-5" to "5" : a "classic" socio-economic axis, which refers to state intervention in the economic process and the degree to which the state should ensure social equality, and a socio-cultural axis, which refers to a divide articulated around an identity-based opposition on themes such as immigration, Europe, crime, the environment, emancipation, etc.
Ecolo then presented a programme marked on the left on the socio-economic level, and close to the extreme left on the socio-cultural level.
The RePresent centre repeated the exercise during the 2024 election campaign for the twelve main parties. Ecolo's positioning changed little on the socio-economic axis, and it became the most left-wing party on the socio-cultural axis.

Election results

Chamber of Representatives

Senate

Regional

Brussels Parliament

German-speaking Community Parliament

Walloon Parliament

European Parliament

Elected politicians

Current

European Parliament

Philippe Lamberts
Saskia Bricmont

Chamber of Representatives

2010 – 2014:

Ronny Balcaen
Juliette Boulet
Olivier Deleuze
Zoé Genot
Muriel Gerkens
Georges Gilkinet
Eric Jadot
Thérèse Snoy et d'Oppuers

Brussels-Capital Region Parlement

2009 – 2014:

Aziz Albishari
Dominique Braeckman
Jean-Claude Defosse
Céline Delforge
Anne Dirix
Anne Herscovici
Zakia Khattabi
Vincent Lurquin
Alain Maron
Jacques Morel
Ahmed Mouhssin
Marie Nagy
Yaron Pesztat
Arnaud Pinxteren
Barbara Trachte
Vincent Vanhalewyn
Past