Edouard Gaudot: Between Giorgia Meloni or Marine Le Pen on the one hand and Jacinda Ardern or Sanna Marin on the other, does it make sense to put a gender on power? The popular view still tends to equate strength, virility, and leadership. Can we get rid of that representation of leadership?

Natalie Bennett: There is no doubt that the conventional model of leadership is a man riding a white horse and wielding a sword. Everything from a deep voice through to physical characteristics – the taller man usually wins the US presidential election, and of course there are also racial aspects. There’s a hugely biased idea of what leadership is. So when it comes to a woman in power, it is much easier for her to be different in gender but familiar in politics. A woman who wants to deliver real democratic change is perceived as more threatening.

There are stereotypes too. Doing politics, I consciously shut off emotions nearly all the time because I saw that a woman in politics can’t afford to show any. You have to be really controlled. It is the same for men in some ways, but strong leadership in traditional terms is utterly gendered.

It was noticeable when Jacinda Ardern stepped down as prime minister of New Zealand by genuine personal choice. It’s hard to think of male leaders who have done a similar thing. And I think that is a wonderful model of leadership. You contribute for a time, you do your best and then leave way for someone else to bring in fresh perspectives and ideas. It’s great, but it’s utterly against the traditional model of politics.

Women have been socialised to be strong but also practical. In many societies, they are expected to make things work but not in a stagey way. Their aim is results, not glory.

So renouncing power is a sign of leadership. Authoritarianism, on the contrary, is about doubling down instead of stepping aside when the time comes. Is it surprising that only female leaders are able to pass on the baton when necessary?

Women have been socialised to be strong but also practical. In many societies, they are expected to make things work but not in a stagey way. Their aim is results, not glory.

Externally, there’s also the fact that women just take a lot more shit of a really narrow gendered kind than men do. Men have a uniform of power, and hardly anyone ever comments on what they look like. Women, on the other hand, not only have to worry about what they do, they also have no choice but to spend a lot of time thinking about what they look like. Their image is seen as a symbol of the success or failure of their leadership. That’s tiring, and some women step aside rather than wait until they fall.

Greens have a peculiar relationship with power, to the point that “green leadership” sometimes sounds like an oxymoron. They might love their leaders, but they fear the personal grip on power.  Is this an impediment in our political systems, which places a high value on individual initiative?

As Greens, we demand a lot more of an elected leader. I often describe the Green Party of England and Wales as intensely democratic – and 95 per cent of the time that’s a wonderful thing. But we also need to let go and trust. Whenever possible, we should keep a collective, cooperative leadership, gathering a range of views from people with practical expertise, and academic experts, and then making a decision. Sometimes, however, either that process is not necessary because the decision is not significant enough, or simply there isn’t time. Someone has to be in a position to make decisions.

We have seen so much untrustworthy behaviour from people in positions of leadership that letting go is not easy. And Greens haven’t often had the opportunity to make decisions, so there isn’t a clear track record of what the right people coming from the right place can achieve. On the other side of it, the people we should trust and learn to trust – and most Green parties have trusted the wrong people at some point – are those who have shown that they can listen and be guided by others, by agreed principles.

It’s a question of building up a “political capital”. Then when you need to use it, and there is no alternative, people will accept your decision – for example in cases of national security, where secrecy can be necessary. When I chair a party conference session, many people in the room have worked with me before, and they know that I’m trying to find a way to get the collective will expressed, so they just let me get on with it.

Greens are usually elected because they bring about a vision, a horizon, be it making a city more sustainable or overhauling a country’s energy model. But events – a war, a natural disaster, a pandemic – always intrude. Can Green leaders pursue their vision while also being good administrators?

I think it can be really difficult if you have no experience of government. Perhaps you’re not even expecting to be in power – whether at local or national level – until it suddenly happens. Maybe your vision has caught the voters’ imagination and you go from having two councillors to running the council. One day you’re a small opposition party, and the next day you’re the government or administration. What we really have to do – and there’s a great responsibility on Green parties because we are in a time of huge political change – is to think from a very early stage about what happens if we succeed. We need to prepare as well as we possibly can.

I have some personal experience of this and have still got the scars to show it. In the 2015 election, the Green Party of England & Wales literally overnight stopped being treated as a minor party. Suddenly the media started to interrogate us and look at us in the same way they looked at parties that had been in power on and off for the last 100 years. That sudden change was something we weren’t ready for.

Now, when I go around the country in England and Wales talking to local parties, I urge people to think about the problems of success and prepare for success. It doesn’t have to be enormously detailed, but it has to set the principles and patterns that will be the foundation for action for any outcome. How will you act on the day after the shock election result when you are in coalition talks, or even (as can happen in the UK) alone in running things? That’s one reason why as Greens, we need to collectively interrogate what Green leadership looks like, to co-create the models and plans. What are the successes and failures of the past, the examples we have? We need a practical model, based on experience and examples (learning to follow the good and avoid the bad) that we can deploy.

When then-British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan was asked what the greatest challenge was for a statesman, he replied, “Events, dear boy, events.”. The challenge of politics is to deliver an agenda and not be taken over by the day-to-day. We need to work out how to manage it.

So according to you, what Green parties have been missing are “cadre schools” for teaching and training the party structure, future leaders and intermediaries. However, this is something the Greens have been quite reluctant to put in place, and it might not just be a matter of money.

That terminology instinctively makes me recoil because it suggests something very centralising and rigid. The model I’m envisaging is closer to what happens in Finland, which is generally regarded as one of the most successful countries in the world, but it still faces massive challenges, from the Russian giant on its border to climate change. I learned that Finland has month-long sessions where people from all walks of life, including business and politics, come together and work through how they would deal with a major crisis.

The public is aware that neoliberalism has failed. Politics will either go further towards far-right populism or shift towards Green ideas. 

We don’t need Green “Bibles” to learn by rote or a technical vocabulary with prescriptions. Instead, give people time and space to think about scenarios, to work through practical examples, to draw on the experience and skills of Greens from different countries. Across Europe and beyond, we have plenty of Greens with experience of being in government at all levels. We need to really convince them to devote time to mixing with other Greens and set up forums to make that happen.

That would be based on practical learning through experience, learning from each other, dealing with real practicalities rather than theoretical models. It would also build mentorship and buddy relationships, so that people have someone to talk a problem over with, perhaps someone who’s been through it before. We’re doing this through the Association of Green Councillors in England and Wales, and it works well.

After the Second World War, welfare states were built around widely shared values such as solidarity, social security, and redistribution. Similarly, there finally seems to be a shared demand for green measures on energy, food, etc. Yet, it seems that the Greens are struggling to articulate policies, and there is a risk that others appropriate their battles and turn them into opportunities for greenwashing. Can Green parties outgrow their minority culture and really take over national and European destinies?

There are historical moments when change must happen. After the Second World War, we had 35 years or so when the “Overton Window” of political possibilities was essentially occupied by social democracy. Then post-Reagan and Thatcher, it was filled by neo-liberal political philosophies.

But this window is now gaping far wider. The public is aware that neoliberalism has failed. Politics will either go further towards far-right populism or shift towards Green ideas. The Green way is built on the understanding that there are enough resources on this planet for everyone to have a decent life while we also look after the climate and nature. The far right, by contrast, says that it’s a difficult, dangerous world, and we’ve got to grab what we can and shove the others away, and eventually build walls to keep them out.

Because as Greens we tend to be very focused on the individual policies, the practical doing, we don’t often paint that picture. However, I think it’s a very compelling one and it can be presented in a very convincing way.

One foundation of that vision is care, understood as people having the opportunity and encouragement to care for each other and for nature. Also central are time and democracy. The last area of democracy that we haven’t collectively tackled yet is giving people control over their own time. That’s the most foundational democracy of all.

There is a misguided perception that change can’t happen because we’ve got to operate within the parameters we are in. But Greens are offering the idea of real change. And change is what people are looking for, so there is an enormous opportunity in this historical moment for Green leadership.

This conversation concludes a series of essays and interviews dedicated to the crisis of political leadership and the alternatives Green thinking has to offer. Read all contributions here.