Europe’s Greens are on the ropes

EUROPE’S GREENS TRY TO STAY RELEVANT: Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts doesn’t really look like a Green. Dressed in his usual suit when we met for lunch at the Maison du Luxembourg restaurant near the European Parliament, the affable former IBM executive told me that when he became an MEP 15 years ago he kept the business attire as a strategy.

“If someone who spent 22 years in a big U.S. multinational comes to tell you that indeed we need a fundamental shift of the economic system, probably this guy’s not totally crazy,” he said, over a dish of wild sea bass, fennel and pak choi. “I like to describe myself as a radical reformist, I’m not a revolutionary.”

Now, after a decade of leading the Greens in the European Parliament, 60-year-old Lamberts is preparing to leave at a particularly painful moment, when the Greens’ internal conflict between pragmatism and idealism — embodied in his suit and green tie — is front and center.