AHC/WI: Make East Bloc Environmentalism and Green politics stronger

[baltur2]

In OTL, the government of Hungary, and at a smaller extent Poland started integrating Green politics into their version of Communism from the late 70s onwards. In East Germany, it happened around the time of the opening of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, when people were openly displaying how fed up they were with the heavily polluting and antiquated industrial technology of the GDR.

In Hungary, the Young Pioneers Movement started gradually phasing out its heavy Communist propaganda around the late 70s and there was a shift to Environmentalism.
For example while the earlier symbol of the movement was a socialist-realist drawing of children looking up at a shining red star, with the caption "Together for eachother!", by the 80s, it was a smiling tree and mushroom with the caption "Nature is our friend!"

In 90s Hungary, TV was full of Environmentalist cartoons for children and most plastic bottles in the country were refundable.

However by 2000, this also was gradually phased out and since then there hasn't been much Green politics in any party in the country's government.

There are some vestiges of the thought among the population, for example Veganism is pretty popular in Hungary by Post-Communist standards, and a few years ago when a Meerkat bit a child at a small zoo and the child slapped it in fear, Facebook exploded with outrage that the child should be beaten up heavily for harming the animal, but government-supported Green politics have all but gone extinct.


Your challenge is to keep late 80s- and early 90s Green politics in the former East Bloc never lose traction and make governments in these countries continue to heavily support it.

 

[SandroPertini98]

Maybe Joschka Fischer never migrate in Germany after World War Two, start his own political career in Hungary as a Green-oriented socialist/center-left politician and is elected Prime Minister of Hungary in 2002. The popularity of his green policies leads to an issue resurgence in others Eastern countries. Attached to this, maybe the dam project of Gabcikovo-Nagymaros on Danube between Hungary and (Czech)Slovakia goes bad, causing an environmental disaster that raises consciousness about nature protection.

 

[David-Shiell]

The Communist Bloc's commitment to environmentalism was largely symbolic, and largely for propaganda purposes. During the Cold War, Communist parties co-opted (or tried to) almost every movement which expressed skepticism of market based economics and/or parliamentary democracy. Peace movements, civil rights movements, environmental movements, etc were all tainted by (often unsolicited) Communist cheer-leading. This taint is such that many environmentalist are dismissed as watermelons. Save-the-Earth Green on the outside, Marxist Red on the inside.
After the Wall fell, almost everything that the ancien regimes championed became an embarrassment, particularly once the real record became known. In order to pump up the Green/Environmental movement in eastern Europe, it might be helpful for the old governments to have been less enthusiastic about "environmentalism". A Green movement less contaminated by association with Communism might be more attractive.