EU lawmakers debate the future of the Green Deal ahead of elections

European lawmakers clashed over the future of the Green Deal in a Parliament debate on Wednesday (24 April) while keeping one eye firmly on the EU elections in June.

In the European Parliament’s last session – before Europeans head to the polls from 6 to 9 June – the outgoing lawmakers discussed the present and the fraught future of the Green Deal.

The current Commission’s flagship policy combining environmental and climate action has come under sustained attack from right-of-centre parties in recent months.

Several signature files – such as the Nature Restoration Law – have been blocked or withdrawn, and the EU’s next five-year cycle is expected to shift away from environmental issues towards economic concerns and competitiveness.

“Let’s make these elections the Green Deal elections,” said Dutchman Bas Eickhout, co-lead candidate for the Greens, who had put the debate on the agenda for Wednesday. 

In 2019, “this house said ‘we support the Green Deal’,” Eickhout said, attacking the right wing of the hemicycle for “weakening, pressuring and watering down legislation” on the nature restoration law, deforestation rules, pesticides, packaging waste, and EVs.

All other lawmakers spoke in their native language as videos of their statements will be easier to circulate in the speakers’ home constituencies. 

Centre-right riposte

The European People’s Party (EPP), the Parliament’s biggest group, fired back: “The EPP stands behind the Green Deal,” said Peter Liese, a lawmaker from Germany. 

Liese, who led the negotiations on the EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) – a key climate file – and fought to extend it to road transport and buildings, stressed that left-wing parties had “rejected” the law in the beginning.

Lidia Pereira, a Portuguese EPP lawmaker, explained that “the far-left, on the 11th hour of this mandate, is trying to correct its excesses”, while other parties were “lumping everything together to the effect that if you don’t go along with their views, you are retrograde, and you will be destroying the environment”.

Socialist commitment

The second-biggest party, the centre-left S&D, cited “the flooding of La Roche” and the forest fire in Limburg, both in Belgium, as evidence that the Green Deal remained as important as ever. 

“The right can try to do anything: they want to get rid of climate initiatives, but they’re not helping anybody,” said Mohammed Chahim, an S&D lawmaker from the Netherlands.

Tiemo Wölken from Germany’s SPD stressed that his group’s goal remained to “link social affordability and climate change.” The €87 billion Social Climate Fund, designed to soften the blow of the EU’s carbon price, is “unfortunately being totally ignored,” he added. 

Liberal dealmaking

Pascal Canfin from the centrist Renew, the third-biggest party, said Parliament should “be very proud of the work we’ve done on the Green Deal.” The French lawmaker, who chaired the environment committee, will not be running for reelection.

His group had “voted with the right on nuclear” and genetically modified crops, and with the left on “nature-based solutions,” he recounted.

“We need all of these solutions. We need to be pragmatic and ambitious and not dogmatic about this.”

He suggested that the right had forgotten that “it’s not the Green Deal that’s going to be the reverse of growth, it is climate change that will ruin our agricultural sovereignty”. 

The right-wing rail against ‘green ideology’

For Beata Szydło, a Polish lawmaker from the nationalist European Conservatives and Reformers (ECR), the culprit is clear: “People can’t pay their bills, people see no future, because of the Green Deal, and we will see this in the elections.” 

“The green ideology, which you’ve tried to ram down the throats of Europeans, doesn’t give Europe a future,” she added. 

Protection of the environment and climate, she stressed, “should not be at the expense of European security or European industry”.

The far-right Identity & Democracy group went even further. 

“We have been financing Europe’s decline,” said Sylvia Sardone, an Italian lawmaker for the ID group.

She said the Green Deal means that “we have to discontinue investment in everything which renders us independent, making us more dependent on China” by importing electric vehicles, solar panels and heat pumps.

The Left stays the course

The “Green Deal has been a significant achievement for Europe,” said Silvia Moding on behalf of the far-left group. “Despite its defects,” it made the EU’s “economy grow in a sustainable fashion,” she added.

Instead of backing down, the “lamentable” fact of climate change required doubling down, she suggested. “We need a Green Deal number two for the next mandate.”

[Edited by Donagh Cagney/Zoran Radosavljevic]

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