Cécile Duflot, Monica Frassoni, Renate Künast and Marina Silva named Top Global Thinkers by FP Special Issue
A funny thing happened after the world's failure to agree on a climate-change plan at the 2009 Copenhagen summit: 2010 became the year of the Greens -- and more specifically, of the Green women. Cécile Duflot, head of France's third-most powerful party, is being dubbed a kingmaker for the 2012 presidential race and recently led the French Greens to strong showings in the European parliamentary and regional races. Renate Künast presides over Germany's Green parliamentary coalition at a time when the party there is polling higher than ever. Italy's Monica Frassoni is the continentwide face of this growing surge as co-president of the European Greens. And Brazil's Marina Silva, a rural labor activist and former environment minister, surprised everyone by forcing her country's recent presidential election into a runoff, placing a strong third with the highest vote share ever garnered by the Green Party there.
What these women share isn't just political ambition; it's also their conviction that the environment is the electoral issue of the future. Economy down? Create green jobs. Worried about feeding a resource-hungry world? Time to innovate new green technologies. "We have vision and think long term, but we apply our political beliefs in concrete reforms," Künast said in August. Someday sooner than you think, they might get the chance.
Text courtesy of Foreign Policy
Marina Silva, former Environmental Minister and Member of the Green Party (Brazil)
Marina Silva is a Brazilian environmentalist and politician. Member of the Workers’ Party until 2009, she first served as a senator before being appointed environmental minister by President Lula da Silva in 2003. She focused on social participation, sustainable development as well as the creation of a National Environmental System and an Integrated Environmental Policy. Silva resigned in 2008 and changed from the Workers’ Party to the Green Party in 2009. Running for president in the 2010 Brazilian elections, she won 19.4% of the popular vote.
Renate Künast, Chairwoman of the Alliance '90/The Greens Bundestag parliamentary group (Germany)
Renate Künast is chairwoman of the German Green party parliamentary group. Before joining the Greens in 1979, Künast worked as a lawyer. From June 2000 to March 2001 she was co-chair of the Green Party on the national level. After that, Künast was the German Minister for Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection from 2001 to 2005. In this position she campaigned for increasing consumer protection, supporting organic farming, and expanding animal welfare. Künast announced in November 2010 that she we will be the Greens’ candidate for Governing Mayor of Berlin in the Berlin state election, 2011.
Monica Frassoni, Member of the Italian Green Party and former Member of the European Parliament
Monica Frassoni is a politician of the Italian Green Party. She was a Member of the European Parliament for the North West of Italy until 2009. Frassoni was co-chair, together with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, of the European Greens–European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament until 2009. Before first being elected as an MEP of the Francophone Green party Ecolo from Belgium in 1999, she served for 10 years as an officer of the Greens group in the European Parliament.
Cécile Duflot, National Secretary of the The Greens (France)
Cécile Duflot is Party Secretary of the French Green Party, a position she has held since November 2006. After joining The Greens in 2001, she became spokesperson for the party in January 2005. Prior to the French presidential election in 2007, she stood for the party's primary to nominate the presidential candidate, earning 23.29 % of the vote. An urban planner by profession, she is a graduate of the ESSEC ("Higher School of Economics and Commerce") and holds a master's degree in Geography.