Editing The Greens (France) (section)

===Early years===
Since 1974, the environmentalist movement has been a permanent feature of the French political scene, contesting every election: municipal, national & European.

In the years following Dumont's challenge for the presidency, and prior to the formal confirmation of les Verts as political party, environmentalists contested elections under such banners as ''Ecology 78'', ''Ecology Europe'' and ''Ecology Today''. When, in 1982, ''the Ecologist Party'' merged with ''the Ecologist Confederation'', les Verts were born. Under the ideological guidance of [[Antoine Waechter]], the party in 1986 signalled a break with the traditional divide in French politics, declaring that environmental politics could not be "married" to either the left or the right (which gave rise to its famous slogan "ni droite, ni gauche" – "neither right, nor left"). Antoine Waechter ran in the [[1988 French presidential election|1988 presidential elections]], capturing 1,150,000 ballots (or 3.8%) in the first round of voting. But the major breakthrough came the following year when – again under the leadership of Waechter – the Greens polled 10.6% in the European parliamentary elections.

However, the party faced with another ecologist party: [[Ecology Generation]] led by [[Brice Lalonde]], environment minister of President [[François Mitterrand]] and allied with the [[Socialist Party (France)|Socialist Party]] (PS). In this, if the ecologist parties benefited from the electoral decline of the PS in the beginning of the 1990s, the Greens competed for the leadership of the French ecologist movement. In the [[1992 French regional elections|1992 regional elections]], the Greens obtained 6.8% of votes and the presidency of [[Nord-Pas-de-Calais]] region. The next year, it scored 4.1% in the [[1993 French legislative election|legislative election]] while all of the ecologist votes represented 11%. But, without political allies in the second round, they failed to gain a parliamentary seat.