European elections:what will happen to the Green Deal and the fight against the climate crisis?

What will happen to the Green Deal in light of the results of the European elections on 9 June?This is what many experts, activists and citizens concerned about the advance of far-right parties in France and Germany and the contraction of support for the Greens which in 2019 were the fourth force in the European Parliament, also driven by the driving force of the Fridays for Future and the student climate strikes.At the time, the newly elected President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, he declared to MEPs:

“If there is one area where the world needs our leadership, it is climate protection…We don't have a minute to waste.The faster Europe moves, the greater the benefit for our citizens, our competitiveness and our prosperity."

"Climate:2019 was the year of awareness, 2020 is the decisive year to intervene", we headlined on January 1, 2020.

In these five years everything has changed.In between there were the pandemic, the lockdowns, the wars.It seems like light years have passed.How will all these events reshape the European Union and climate policies?

The 2024 European elections they essentially confirmed the balance of power that we have seen in the European Parliament in the last five years, disproving some fears of the day before.The groups of the European People's Party, the European Socialist Party and the liberals of Renew Europe can in fact constitute an autonomous majority exactly as happened five years ago.All this suggests that the European Union will not reverse the course of the ecological transition and the objective of making Europe the first continent to achieve climate neutrality.“I don't think we will back down on climate policies,” commented Bas Eickhout, head of the Green group.

According to several experts, heard from the British site Carbon Brief, it will be difficult to go back five years and cancel the package of EU laws that come under the big umbrella of the Green Deal.The ecological transition is a path now underway and slowing it down would also be counterproductive for the European industry which would risk losing ground to China and the United States, which are already dominant in the clean energy sector.These laws, however, will need to be fully implemented to achieve the EU's climate goals.

However, the strengthening of conservative parties and the greater presence of right-wing parties to the detriment of the Greens (which have lost a quarter of the seats and have become the sixth group by number of MEPs) could weaken the political momentum of the EU agenda on the matter of climate policies and make it more difficult to pass new, more ambitious laws.

Much will depend on how the European People's Party (EPP) interprets its mandate on climate and whether it continues to seek dialogue with far-right parties, as happened in the last months of the legislature that has just ended, reflects Nils Redeker, deputy director of the center Jacques Delors studies.

What will happen to the electrification of the transport system, to the commitments for finance and climate justice, to the proposal of law for the protection of nature and biodiversity (which has suffered a strong backlash from agricultural lobbies), to the desire expressed in the past to set a legally binding emissions target for 2040 which will mean transformations in sectors such as housing and transport and will have a direct impact on daily life of each of us?Second an article about Politic, one of the pillars of the Green Deal, the ban on the sale of new cars with combustion engines scheduled for 2035, could come back into question.

Negotiations on the next president of the European Commission and his political agenda will be decisive in understanding the direction the European Union will take in combating the climate crisis and whether it wants to be a global leader on climate issues.

Everything suggests that there will be continuity with the past five years, both because the balance between the EPP and the Socialists and Democrats still remains solid, and because, to secure a second mandate, the outgoing President of the European Commission, Ursula von Der Leyen, will have the social democrats' own need.Meanwhile, the Greens have made it known that they intend to support von der Leyen if he relaunches climate policies, reports the Financial Times.

What is expected is less rhetorical emphasis on climate as a political priority.“Even if climate is less explicitly mentioned by the Commission, it will still be central,” says Linda Kalcher, executive director of Strategic Perspectives.“Many new initiatives of the next Commission will most likely concern strengthening industrial competitiveness and energy security.The high geopolitical and economic cost of dependence on gas, oil and coal imports remains a major challenge for the competitiveness of the economy and energy bills."And the answer, according to Kalcher, is “to invest in resilient and secure clean energy and storage systems, capable of offering the continent long-term security and reducing the risk of Russia exerting influence over climate-dependent member states. gas".

But this is precisely the distinction between more or less ambitious policies, explains Federica Genovese, professor of political science and international relations at the University of Oxford:“Substantial scaling back of the Green Deal will depend on whether the EU looks at climate as a social redistribution or geopolitical security agenda.”

In this respect, the advance of far-right parties in France and Germany, the largest European economies and among the countries where much of European decarbonisation should materialize, is a wake-up call.In particular, it tells us that the ecological transition cannot be an issue that can be resolved simply as "business-as-usual", observes Simone Tagliapietra, senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank.

There is a need for more protagonism from member states and institutions to accompany the transformation of our energy systems.“Climate policies must be rethought and connected with the needs of society.Politics fails to make the ecological transition more accessible and tangible for the majority", observes Luca Bergamaschi, co-founder of the Italian think tank ECCO.And the rhetoric of far-right parties that make climate policies a threat to the energy and food security of European citizens fits into this vulnerability.This is, for example, the position of our Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, who opposed the introduction of European standards on the energy efficiency of homes, dismissed as "ideological madness" the ban on introducing new petrol vehicles and diesel in 2035 and recently said that renewables jeopardize farmers' safety.His positions have been dismantled in this article of Financial Times.This was it the tenor of the farmers' protests as well That with tractors they paralyzed Europe last winter.

“European leaders and ministers are now called to work together to build an agenda and design a policy capable of bridging the gap between long-term goals and daily needs,” adds Bergamaschi.“To meet citizens, one of the main tasks should be to design and offer concrete solutions for different social classes.At an economic level, we need bolder plans to mobilize the necessary capital and direct it to industrial players who want to invest in innovation."

“The Green Deal has come a long way since it was conceived five years ago, and this election marks a new beginning for this agenda rather than its abandonment,” concludes Tagliapietra.“Now [the Green Deal] must start again with a new agenda focused on green investment, green social support and green industrial policy.Decarbonization is the only way forward.The new majority of the European Parliament has the responsibility to guide it, avoiding unnecessary shortcuts."

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