NATALIE BENNETT joined the Green Party of England and Wales in 2006, following a New Year's resolution. On September 3rd she became its second leader. Meteoric is not the right word for her rise, as the Greens, who gained their first MP in 2010, can hardly be said to occupy the political heavens. But Ms Bennett foresees steady growth ahead. Having her alongside Caroline Lucas (the party's sole MP, who has stepped down as leader) will increase the party's airtime, she says, while discontent with the coalition government will boost its appeal. The Greens will target ten seats at the general election in 2015. Minor parties are attracting more support than ever before, says Matthew Goodwin, an expert on the subject at Nottingham University. Almost 12% voted for parties other than the three main ones in 2010 - the highest "other party" vote since the second world war. Polls show that disaffected Liberal Democrats are more inclined to switch to the Greens than to Labour or the Conservatives. The Greens have already built up a base of 133 council seats, far more than any other minority party. Norwich, a fairly conventional city, is their second strongest council after bohemian Brighton (see article). By European standards, though, the Greens" success has been paltry. An eye-catching breakthrough in 1989, when they won 15% of the vote for the European Parliament (it helped that Britain's beaches were then strewn with seal corpses), was never consolidated. Ms Lucas blames Britain's electoral system: without proportional representation and state funding, nascent parties will struggle to rise as quickly as they do on the continent, she says. That is true of other small parties too: UKIP won more than three times as many votes as the Greens in 2010, but no seats in Parliament. Another reason may be that Britain didn't have much of a 1968. It lacks the cohort of counter-culturalists who made up the original rump of Green support in Germany and France. Things are even more difficult in straitened times. The Greens" core vote - the professional middle class - is now Ed Miliband's "squeezed middle," points out Vernon Bogdanor of King's College London. The proportion of voters who believe climate change is the result of human activity has fallen from 55% to 43% since 2008. In recession the Greens are liable to end up like an appendix: a vestigial remnant of a more vegetarian past. The Greens are not a single-issue party. They have worked with anti-austerity campaigners like UK Uncut, and strongly oppose a shrivelling of the state. Ms Bennett's party calls for a living wage of £8.10 ($12.88) an hour, and argues that top pay should be capped at ten times that. Today's 17-year-olds are more radical than their elders thanks to higher tuition fees, she suggests. But economic populism will deter other supporters. Pledges to rebalance the economy around green energy involve a relaxed attitude to economic growth, which will worry the cash-strapped. It is unlikely that the Greens will soon terrify the Liberal Democrats as much as UKIP does the Tories.