EU’s green policies have been chucked under a tractor

Mention environment and climate policy in Brussels these days and you’re often met with a resigned shrug or a frustrated sigh depending on who you are talking to. Green politics is out of favour, having become a casualty of the growing anxiety about the coming elections.

The climate crisis was one of the most pressing topics on the agenda during the last European elections, particularly for younger voters. On the back of that wave of concern the Green grouping secured a record number of seats – more than 70 of the 705 on offer – in the European Parliament in 2019.

This in part drove the scale of ambition set out in the Green Deal launched later that year, a major policy platform of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

In Ireland the Greens won two seats with the election of Ciarán Cuffe in Dublin and Grace O’Sullivan in the South constituency, while the party also took a raft of council seats in the simultaneous local elections. As the last votes were still being counted, a group of young party activists were celebrating over drinks in the bar of a Ballsbridge hotel down the road from the RDS count centre. There was a huge sense of energy and optimism in the room, both at the results in Ireland and across Europe: The Greens were back.

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Now the party’s two Irish MEPs face a dogfight to hold on to their seats in the coming European Parliament elections. The trend is much the same across the EU as polls predict the “green tide” receding in June.

In Germany, traditionally a stronghold for the Greens, the party’s grouping could lose a third of its MEPs, according to a poll by Ipsos for Euronews published last month. All in, the Green grouping in the European Parliament is projected to go from 72 seats down to about 50, according to that poll.

Protests by farmers in national capitals have worried the leaders of several EU countries as the elections loom and caused anxiety in the European People’s Party (EPP), the centre-right grouping that includes Fine Gael.

In the face of polls predicting a swing towards far-right parties EU policymakers and politicians have cooled on environment and climate legislation. Over the last year this rightward shift has seen a plan to cut down on the use of pesticides scrapped, more concessions to the agricultural lobby and carve outs made to a ban on combustion engines by 2035.

Von der Leyen, who is seeking a second term as head of the commission, has shifted with those winds too. “You can’t please everyone, the commission is trying to please everyone”, one EU official said to me recently.

The latest piece of environmental reform to fall victim to the rollback is the Nature Restoration Law, landmark legislation aimed at protecting nature and reversing biodiversity loss. A watered-down version of the law squeezed through a European Parliament vote in February, despite being opposed by the EPP. It had already been pared back to try to meet the concerns of some member states.

When it came to formally signing off on the law in recent weeks the vote at a meeting of environment ministers had to be postponed. In a last-minute switch Hungary joined Italy, the Netherlands and others in opposing the law, meaning it could not clear the final hurdle, which is often seen as a rubber-stamping exercise.

A further debate among ministers in Brussels last week to try to find a way forward for the policy ended without agreement. One Irish diplomatic source said the prospects of the law getting over the line in the last months of this five-year cycle now looked slim. “The most likely thing is that nothing will happen on it either way until after the elections,” they said.

Efforts to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss on a similarly ambitious scale in the next European Parliament will face an uphill struggle from the start if the predicted electoral lurch to the right materialises.

Faustine Bas-Defossez, the European Environmental Bureau’s director of nature and environment, said many important elements of the Green Deal had been “buried”. Instead of large demonstrations calling for action on climate change it was now farmer protests that were framing the EU agenda. “You don’t have youth in the streets, we have tractors,” she said.