The Federation of Green Lists was formed in 1984 by leading environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists, notably including Gianni Mattioli, Gianfranco Amendola, Massimo Scalia and Alexander Langer.
The party made its debut at the 1987 general election and obtained 2.6% of the vote, gaining 13 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and two senators.
At the 1989 European Parliament election there were two competing green parties: the LV and the Rainbow Greens (VA), formed mainly by Radicals, including Adelaide Aglietta, Franco Corleone, Adele Faccio, Marco Taradash and Francesco Rutelli, as well as splinters from Proletarian Democracy, including Mario Capanna, Guido Pollice, Gianni Tamino and Edo Ronchi.
In 1990 the two parties joined forces to form the Federation of the Greens, which inherited from the LV the Smiling Sun symbol of the northern European anti-nuclear movement, designed by Danish activist Anne Lund in 1975.
[5] In 1995 the Greens were a founding member of The Olive Tree coalition and in the 1996 general election,[4] thanks to this alliance and several candidates in single-seat constituencies, they obtained 14 deputies and 14 senators, their highest number ever.
[4] The party was thus re-organised under Grazia Francescato, a former president of the Italy's section of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
After the alliance with the SDI, a relatively centrist party, the Greens shifted far to the left, prompting the exit of leading members as Ronchi, Mattioli, Scalia, Corleone and Manconi.
[5] In February 2005 the Greens joined The Union, the new successor alliance to The Olive Tree, with party secretary Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio receiving 2.2% of the vote in the open primary election for the coalition's leader.
[5] In 2006–2008 Pecoraro Scanio served as minister of the Environment, while Paolo Cento, national coordinator of the party and leader of the no global faction, was undersecretary of Economy and Finances.
Within the PD, they joined the Democratic Ecologists' faction, which already included several former Greens (Manconi, Ronchi, Lino De Benetti, Stefano Semenzato, Ermete Realacci, Gianni Vernetti, Franco Piro, Francesco Ferrante, Carla Rocchi, etc.).
After the election, it was decided to transform SL into a permanent federation, that would eventually evolve into the joint party named Left Ecology Freedom (SEL), and Francescato wanted the Greens to join it.
[11] Francescato, De Petris and Cento continued to support SL as the Ecologists Association and would eventually leave the Greens.
[14] As a result, in November 2011 the Ecologists and Civic Networks (Ecologisti e Reti Civiche, ERC) coalition was officially launched,[15][16] but it would be just a short-lived experiment.
[29] In December 2017, in an internal referendum, 73% of Green members voted in favour of their party's return to the moderate centre-left coalition led by the PD.
[37] In the run-up to the 2019 European Parliament election the party formed Green Europe (EV), a joint electoral list with Italy in Common (IiC) and GI.
Their characterization as party of the far left did not help them in northern Italy,[citation needed] where they had their best results at the beginning (for instance 7.1% in the 1990 Venetian regional election).