The worrying backlash to the European Green Deal

Many of the European Union’s heads of state and government leaders have called for a ‘regulatory pause’ on climate and environmental issues. They are concerned about the consequences of measures designed to lead the EU-27 to carbon neutrality. Many Le Monde correspondents (Virginie Malingre, Thomas Wieder, Allan Kaval,  Anne-Françoise Hivert, Sandrine Morel, Cécile Ducourtieux, Hélène Bienvenu and Jean-Pierre Stroobants), have put together an important article surveying the reaction throughout Europe.

 

Europe’s Green Deal initiative is stalling

Over the past two years, EU leaders have embarked on a veritable legislative marathon to establish the European Green Deal and put themselves in a position to comply with the Paris Agreement. In record time, they have passed 32 pieces of legislation – from ending the internal combustion engine in 2035, to the introduction of a carbon border tax – which should enable them to reduce their CO2 emissions by 55% by 2030 compared to 1990, and put them on the road to carbon neutrality by 2050. To meet their roadmap, they still have a good 40 bills to finalize, which are more related to the environment than the fight against global warming.

Of course, some Central and Eastern European countries with carbon-intensive economies, such as Poland and Hungary, were reluctant to sign up, arguing that they could not go as far as their Western partners. But until recently the European Green Deal kept moving forward, through good times and bad. In recent weeks, however, progress has become more hesitant, and its pace has been called into question.

French President Emmanuel Macron, the first of a strong majority of European Union (EU) member state leaders to bear the implications of a proactive climate policy, launched the offensive on May 11 by calling for a “regulatory pause.” In the same vein, another liberal, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, proposed “pressing the pause button” on biodiversity-related issues.

On the political right, European heads of state and government leaders – Nikos Christodoulides (Cyprus), Krisjanis Karins (Latvia), Ulf Kristersson (Sweden), Kyriakos Mitsotakis (Greece), Karl Nehammer (Austria), Petteri Orpo (Finland), Andrej Plenkovic (Croatia) and Leo Varadkar (Ireland) – have followed suit. They all approved, on June 29, a declaration by the European People’s Party (EPP) calling for “a regulatory pause” on the Green Deal and for “account to be taken of the new economic and social realities following Russia’s attack” on Ukraine, in February 2022.

A new economic environment

“We’re in the hard part of implementing the Green Deal. There is a question of social acceptability for certain sectors of the population,” said a European diplomat. Indeed, the leaders fear that they too will be confronted with a revolt like that of France’s Yellow Vest protest movement, which traumatized the Elysée in the winter of 2018-2019. They also have in mind the farmers’ revolt movements in the Netherlands that followed the 2022 plan to reduce nitrogen emissions, and also the breakthrough in March’s Dutch provincial elections of a new anti-Green Deal party, the Farmer–Citizen Movement, which turned the local political landscape on its head. And they are worried about the rise in the polls of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), the German far-right party that has made the fight against the ban on gas and oil-fired boilers its hobbyhorse.

Rising interest rates, rising inflation, and slowing business activity: The new economic environment is less conducive to pursuing the Green Deal, which affects the daily lives of citizens and businesses and requires investment.

All the more so because the forthcoming legislation – 37 bills are currently being negotiated between the EU member states (EU-27) and the European Parliament, and six more have yet to be tabled by the European Commission – often concerns farmers. And in these times of rising food prices, the topic is a highly flammable one.

And that is not all. The EU-27 are concerned about the competitiveness of the European economy, at a time when China and the United States are massively subsidizing their green industries, and when rising credit costs are weighing on the profitability of many projects.

In addition, the Green Deal legislation, adopted in urgency, is complicating business life. “All of this legislation was drawn up without any impact studies,” lamented a European diplomat. What is more, in some respects, they benefit third-party countries more than European industry, as illustrated by the case of the electric car, whose batteries come mainly from China. “Competitiveness has become the main preoccupation of the leaders. If we were starting to discuss the Green Deal today, there would be no Green Deal,” confided another European diplomat.

In Brussels, the situation has changed

Against this backdrop, the situation in Brussels has changed, especially as emblematic Green Deal Commissioner Frans Timmermans has left his post to head a social-democrat and green party list in the Dutch parliamentary elections on November 22.

A number of legislative proposals that were scheduled before the European elections – to be held from June 6 to 9, 2024 – such as the revision of the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation, a bill on animal welfare and another on sustainable food systems, are still not on the EU executive’s agenda.

In her State of the Union 2023 address, on September 13, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen announced “the next phase of the Green Deal,” more in tune with citizens and businesses, thereby pandering to the right wing, from which she hails and which she will need if she is to run for a second term after the European elections. She also refrained from mentioning the target to be set by the EU-27 to reduce their CO2 emissions by 2040, while they have so far focused on the 2030 target.

In the European Parliament, the EPP, the largest political group, has joined forces with the far right in recent months to undermine the environmental transition. The nature restoration bill has been gutted as a result.

The member states have also put their foot on the brake. The EU-27 have just ruled out tougher anti-pollution standards for cars, on the grounds that the automotive industry needs to focus on the switch to all-electric by 2035.

Transport and housing at the heart of European concerns

In many countries, the same tensions can be found at the community level. Even in those countries led by social democrats – the most active at this level – tensions, and even challenges, are appearing.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who campaigned for climate protection in 2021, is finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile his declared voluntarism with his government’s policies. The latest example of this came on September 25, when, citing difficulties in the construction sector, Berlin abandoned its plans to impose a new energy efficiency standard for buildings. This was included in the coalition agreement signed in 2021 by the Social Democratic (SPD) Scholz, his environmentalist partners and the FDP liberals.

In Spain, Socialist Pedro Sanchez’s government is facing a rebellion from several cities that switched to the right after the May 28 municipal elections. They are now rejecting the low-emission zones they were supposed to introduce in 2024. In Majadahonda, a chic Madrid neighborhood, the local council voted against the measure, castigating “the climate religion of the West.”

Transport and housing are at the heart of concerns for European governments, still smarting from the Yellow Vests movement in France. “I love the car,” said Macron on September 24, evoking a “French-style environmentalism” that is “neither the denial” of the far right, “nor the cure” sought by the disciples of degrowth.

Even though, “by 2030, we need to be going twice as fast” as in recent years in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to reach the targets set by the European Union, the French president refuses, for example, to limit freeway speeds to 110 kilometers per hour or to ban gas-fired boilers. On September 26, his finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, even said that he was “very much in favor” of revising the timetable for legislation that would ban the rental of energy-draining buildings, before backtracking. The debate has only just begun.

In Stockholm, the coalition of the right and extreme right has eased taxes on hydrocarbons and constraints on the proportion of biofuels in petrol and diesel. As a result, Sweden’s CO2 emissions will rise for the second year running, the first time this has happened in 20 years, and the country will be unable to meet its European commitments.

Outside the EU, the UK, which had set out to be Europe’s climate change pioneer, has also backtracked on key measures. On September 20, Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that the switch to all-electric for new cars and the ban on gas and oil-fired boilers, would be postponed for several years, jeopardizing his goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

High-risk electoral considerations

By promising his fellow citizens a “painless” energy transition, the Briton hopes to reverse the polls, which have Labour winning the 2024 elections. Without question, election periods do not always help the climate cause, especially as the Greens are not in their best form in Europe.

In the Netherlands, the environmental and energy transition is one of the main topics of the legislative campaign. Faced with the left led by Timmermans, the Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) is advocating the kingdom’s withdrawal from EU environmental policies, putting the right-wing parties – the Liberals and Christian Democrats – under pressure to harden their stance.

In Poland, the approach of the October 15 parliamentary elections, which are expected to be tight for the conservative national government, is also putting the Green Deal under pressure. This summer, Warsaw went on a crusade against these climate measures, taking six Green Deal laws to the EU Court of Justice, notably those concerning carbon market reform and the end of the internal combustion engine.

In Germany too, Berlin’s recent back-pedaling is linked to the political context. On the one hand, the liberal FDP, which is lagging behind in the polls, is pushing for it. On the other, a few weeks ahead of the regional elections in Hesse and Bavaria – on October 8 – both the conservatives (CDU-CSU) and the AfD are denouncing an environmental policy that is said to be synonymous with constraint and cost. With the far right now ahead of Scholz’s SPD in opinion polls, the German government is playing it safe on an increasingly divisive terrain. It has proposed an overhaul of the Climate Protection Act, which underwent its first reading in the Bundestag on September 22. It provides for an overall CO2 emissions reduction target and only obliges Berlin to take action if this is not achieved for two years in a row, despite the fact that, since 2019, targets are defined on an annual sector-by-sector basis, with each ministry obliged to stick to them.

New right-wing, anti-Green Deal governments

The fact is, where the far right governs, the climate cause takes a back seat. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni, elected in October 2022, is fighting an environmental transition that could threaten certain agricultural and industrial sectors. As soon as she took office, she replaced the Ministry of Environmental Transition set up by her predecessor, Mario Draghi, with a Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security. The Italian prime minister has also asked the European Commission to review the aid Rome is entitled to under the European recovery plan. Meloni wants these funds to finance investment in her country’s gas pipeline network, preferring to forego the €6 billion earmarked for municipal energy efficiency and for protecting against the risks of natural disasters. For Meloni wants to see Italy become a gas hub between Africa and Europe, at a time when Moscow has turned off the Russian faucets.

In Sweden, the arrival to power of the right and extreme right in September 2022 has also changed the situation. The far-right Sweden Democrats campaigned on protecting household purchasing power, with a line of force shared by the right: that the environmental transition must not affect people’s daily lives. They also believe that their country has done a great deal to combat climate change, and that it is now up to others to step up to the plate.

Sweden, the UK and Germany have already backtracked away from their targets in the fight against global warming. Others, including France, look to be tempted to follow suit. Against the backdrop of campaigns for the June 2024 European Parliament election, Europeans know that the fate of the Green Deal will be decided in the coming weeks.

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