In the immediate aftermath of European Union elections over the weekend, some analysts say climate and green economy policies could be undermined after a strong showing for far-right parties, while others say economic and social issues are stronger drivers of the outcome.
On Sunday, Europeans voted for candidates running to be members of the European Parliament, which acts together with the Council of the European Union as the EU’s legislative branch. In the lead up to the vote, far-right parties were expected to gain more seats and, accordingly, more political weight. While preliminary results indicate that they did, the overall outcome may not lead to a dramatic shift, in power as other parties are already seeking alliances, reports the Associated Press.
The outcome could bear heavily on the EU’s climate progress in recent years.
“I think pretty much everything is at stake in terms of the EU’s climate policies,” said Laura Horn, a political economist at Roskilde University in Denmark and member of Scientist Rebellion.
But “despite a lot of the attention going to the far-right gains, a vast majority of Europeans still voted for parties in the political centre,” Vincent Hurkens, the lead on EU politics at the E3G climate think tank, told The Guardian. “It is up to the centre right, liberals, and social democrats [to decide] how much power and influence they allow the far-right and their ideas to have on the future of the European Green Deal. Choices by these political families in the upcoming weeks will be decisive for Europe’s capacity to act against dramatic impacts and risks of climate change.”
With the votes counted, the two mainstream and pro-European groups, the centre-right European People’s Party and the Social Democrats, are still dominant. The People’s Party, led by current EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, had shifted its own policies on immigration and climate to the right to prevent votes from moving to more extreme candidates, and it ultimately gained seats. The Social Democrats lost some seats, as did Renew Europe. But much of the rightward shift came at the expense of the Greens, who are down 18 seats.
“In previous European parliamentary elections, climate protests had pushed environmental concerns to the forefront of the political agenda across most of the EU,” Jessica Haak, a political scientist at Hamburg University, told The Guardian, adding that shift in perceived importance of climate change likely contributed to the Greens’ losses.
“Although voters in some western European countries still consider climate issues important, they prioritized economic concerns, migration, and war.”
Some notable election outcomes across the bloc of 27 countries showed up in Italy, Germany, and France. Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni won handily, while German Chancellor Olaf Schulz’s Social Democrats lost heavily to the centre-right and were left with just 14% of the vote. Marine LePen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, showed such strong gains that President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the country’s national assembly and called a snap election.
But the seat counts for the centre-right and centre-left parties will still allow them to form a majority coalition in Parliament.
Far-right groups have been gaining traction across the bloc in recent years, benefitting from politics around issues like the COVID-19 pandemic, immigration, agriculture, the war in Ukraine, and climate change. The last election cycle had ushered in a wave of pro-climate politicians, which allowed the last parliamentary session to pass numerous pieces of legislation to advance climate action. But while the legislation that has already been enacted will be hard to undo, analysts warn that the far-right’s animosity to climate policies could mean those policies will now be weakened or slowed down, says Reuters.
“If we see an increase in right wing power at the level of the EU Parliament, which is what people are expecting, then we’re going to see a rollback, or at least a stalling, of European climate policy,” J. Timmons Roberts, executive director of the Climate Social Science Network and a researcher at Brown University, told Inside Climate News before the election.
Right wing parties in the EU “strongly influence climate narratives and fuel divisive debates,” but so far they have been limited by national and EU rules, coalition constraints, and “lack of feasibility” of their extreme proposals. However, they have still been able to hamper “climate policy at the local, regional, and national levels and their influence continues to grow.” According to one new report, the antagonism to climate policies by the far-right has been fuelled by propaganda and election misinformation framed to scare voters with claims that climate policies will, for instance, force them to eat insects or give up their cars. Some of this misinformation has financial ties to fossil fuel companies, reports Clean Energy Wire.
Leading up to the election, some analysts said concerns about a backlash to climate policies were overblown and cited polls showing that the majority of Europeans supporting stronger action on climate change. Hannah Mowat, Campaigns Coordinator at Fern, an international non-government organization that tracks the EU’s involvement in forests, wrote earlier in June that the far-right’s policies on environmental issues was missing the mark in its attempts to attract rural voters. Similarly, the farmer protests across the continent that have been framed as right-wing, anti-climate, and anti-environment, have been shown to be diverse and driven by economic and social issues.
The Guardian’s Europe environment correspondent Ajit Niranjan says climate policy is really a side issue for far-right politicians who treat it as an “easy win” in the culture wars, while campaigns really focus on issues of immigration, identity, and economics.
“Their supporters generally accept the science of climate change and vote based on their other policy positions,” Niranjan writes.
