The nearest thing to Green Deal

On 9 June, polls showed conservatives making gains as expected: the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP, conservative) strengthened their position as the EU largest political group, with an estimated 190 seats, up from the outgoing legislature.

Speaking of results, it’s worth mentioning a fact-check by the weekly Top Fake team of Belarusian Investigative Center who debunked a Telegram channel reporting that the ultra-right-wing parties will dominate the new Parliament.

“The power dynamic in the European Parliament has remained largely unchanged after the recent elections, with the same parties remaining in the majority,” they explained.

Indeed, as written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa about the Italian Risorgimento,  “everything must change for everything to remain the same”: negotiators agreed about two weeks later that current Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen, also from the EPP, should get once again the top job at the European Commission.

It may sound odd, and it in fact is, but what happened throws a spanner in the works of the EU’s climate agenda.

Launched after the 2019 elections on the back of the Greens’ wave and climate movements like Fridays for Future, the European Green Deal is considered one of the biggest successes of von der Leyen.

Yet, it was her own party that has been complaining about the excess of environment and climate regulation over the past year, a move that NGOs considered part of the electoral campaign and a wink to industrial groups and farmers, or we should say big agri companies, protesting over the same perception.

Meanwhile, Austrian minister Leonore Gewessler swept away months of discussions around a long-waited law to protect ecosystems with her vote in favour of the Nature Restoration Law.

She did so in open contrast with Austria’s chancellor, Karl Nehammer, arguing he couldn’t legally speak for Austria when he refused to back the regulation in the past.

Louise Guillot in Politico defined Gewessler “rogue”, while Kurier’s reporters Raffaela Lindorfer, Christian Böhmer, Johanna Hager, and Josef Gebhard followed the whole saga.

In a podcast for Informatíon, Anna von Sperling, Rune Lykkeberg and Marie Sæhl mentioned some of the places where we should protect nature.

What does all of this mean for EU climate policies?

Contrary to five years ago, the 2024 election to the European Parliament was not a “climate vote”, however the Green Deal still represents a central element for the next five years. The package can’t simply be undone, as conservatives claim, but it certainly can be slowed down in its implementation-phase at a national level.

To avoid choosing between sharing her party’s concerns for industrial competitiveness and embracing her personal past achievement, von der Leyen found the perfect deal: a “green, industrial deal” that she mentioned already in 2023 and is supposed to make everyone happy.

By being the nearest thing to the original, a new policy package could either solve the EU economic conundrum, or turn out to be a scam.

In Domani, Ferdinando Cotugno defines it a “Green Deal 2.0”, “the other leg of the European climate project”, or a “broad green deindustrialisation plan”, which “could allow the European Union to compete with China and the United States: an integrated industrial strategy, supported by a new financial architecture and alliances with the global south to break the Beijing-Washington duopoly on the transition”.

Also writing for Domani, Francesca De Benedetti is in Brussels for a few weeks to follow what is happening in the aftermath of the EU elections. She talked with Bas Eickhout, one of the leaders of the Greens, who have been trying to change the balance and present as “the alternative” to Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia.

Interviewed by Taz, climate protection activist Luisa Neubauer did not hide her disappointment with the results of the European elections, in particular with the German Greens’ significant fall compared to 2019.

“The vast majority of youth is very worried about the climate crisis, but have less and less hope […] The fact that such political hopelessness prevails on the ecological front is a democratic injustice and should give all parties food for thought,” Neubauer said. “This is also leading to a massive loss of trust in the climate competence of politicians.”

Other crises, wars and energy supply challenges, took over the urgency of fighting climate change, but people are still convinced governments should act: a UN survey around the world showed that 80% of the population want stronger initiative by their countries.

In France, where president Emmanuel Macron called the snap legislative elections following his party’s defeat at the EU level, journalists from Reporterre hosted an event on ecology against the far-right National Rally.

The party is currently leading in the polls, while Macron’s centrist Renaissance comes third after the New Popular Front, which unites the Socialists, the Greens, the Communists, and the far-left.

Audrey Fisné-Koch in Alternatives Economiques notes that RN left nothing unattempted and even instrumentalized the feminist discourse for racist ends.

Also in France, Jade Lindgaard writes in Mediapart about the climate impact of the other big event of the summer, the Olympics, which could be worse than expected.

Sport fans and tourists be aware: in Greece people are dying from the effects of heat waves, as well as all around the world, says Efsyn.

But I’ll leave you with a positive note: an “almost divine process”, photosynthesis, can help slow down climate change. William Sass’ quite poetic yet scientifically accurate piece is in Informatíon.

Last but not least, don’t forget that even the Paris Agreement’s architect Laurence Tubiana is calling for the rich to pay more to tackle the climate crisis. The story, by Fiona Harvey, is in The Guardian.

I hope you enjoyed this year-long trip through European media with us, and that it kept your hopes high as they should be, especially when it comes to journalism.