History and General Information
The Party was founded 1982, originally named Movimento Ecologista Português - Partido "Os Verdes", by a group of Portuguese citizens interested in the promotion of the ecologist movement in the Portuguese society and the support of the Portuguese Communist Party and including in its founders one of its members, Zita Seabra.
In the end of the 1970s, the World was facing new ecological problems, such as the greenhouse effect and the depletion of the ozone layer and the lack of awareness of this in Portuguese society, along with the lack of an organized Ecologist movement led to the foundation of the Ecologist Party "The Greens" in order to put such problems on the political agenda.
The Party created regional groups right after its foundation, groups that have continued to grow since then. The growth of the Party throughout the country allowed many members to integrate the electoral lists of the CDU, some being elected to very different tasks. Currently (as of 2005), The PEV has several members elected in Municipal Assemblies and Parish Assemblies and two members elected in the Assembly of the Republic (Portuguese parliament). Those two members are Heloísa Apolónia and Francisco Madeira Lopes.
There is widespread criticism on its close ties to the Communist Party, given that PEV never stood in elections on its own, those criticisms going to the point of nicknaming PEV "The Watermelons - Greens Outside, Reds Inside". The fact is official positions of both parties in certain questions are quite different: for example, PCP supports nuclear energy, while PEV is against.
The PEV is also present in the National Electoral Commission and also in the National Council of Education.
The youth wing of the Party is the Ecolojovem, founded in 1989, which is a founding member of the Federation of Young European Greens.
The PEV edits a newspaper, the Folha Verde (Green Leaf), which received several press prizes for its unique design and style.
Read more about this topic: Ecologist Party "The Greens"
Famous quotes containing the words history and, history, general and/or information:
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)
“I have all my life been on my guard against the information conveyed by the sense of hearing—it being one of my earliest observations, the universal inclination of humankind is to be led by the ears, and I am sometimes apt to imagine that they are given to men as they are to pitchers, purposely that they may be carried about by them.”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (1689–1762)