blue-green alliance

A Blue-Green alliance describes an alliance between political parties and other organizations. It has several different meanings that may be evidence that green politics is "neither left nor right", and can ally with either in a given context.

New Zealand

The now defunct Progressive Green Party was a political group with a strong environmental focus. It was closely aligned with the centre right National Party. The "blue-green" Progressive Greens were contrasted with the better-known "red-green" Green Party, which generally takes a left-wing position. (A third group, the Green Society, rejected both "blue-green" and "red-green" politics.)

United Kingdom

In the context of United Kingdom politics it refers to a possible alliance on certain issues between the Conservative Party and ecologists or environmentalists such as those found in the UK Green Party. This alliance may occur as a result of the Conservative view that market economics help preserve the environment and a tendency toward Deep England views of pastoralism, and the Green view that profit is not anywhere near as much of a threat to natural systems as debt.

United States

In the context of the politics of the United States, the term refers to alliances between labor unions and environmentalists, and sometimes specifically to cooperation between the Green Party of the United States and blue-collar labor activists. The core issue of this alliance is opposition to globalization and to free trade, and it was significant in the candidacy of Ralph Nader in the 2000 Presidential election, as Nader was endorsed by some labor organizations (the overwhelming majority of labor unions and environmental organizations are loyal to the Democratic Party and endorsed Al Gore). It also continues to be used more generally to refer to any efforts at coalition-building between environmenalists and labor, as with the famous "teamsters and turtles" politics of the WTO Meeting of 1999 and the continuing anti-globalization movement. One such example is the Blue Green Alliancehttp://www.bluegreenalliance.org, a grouping of officials, staff, and activists from organized labor and major environmental organizations representing more than nine million members, including the nation's largest union and largest environmental organization. This group has been very active in promoting a labor-friendly plan to stop global warming. Other relevant organizations include the Alliance for the Sustainable Jobs and the Environment and the Apollo Alliance. The two different meanings may not be as different as they first appear - the UK Conservative Party and US trade unions both favour universal health care, and are both suspicious of currency union or free trade provisions that extend to utterly open immigration. On the so-called left-right axis these forces may be very similar.