Europe’s Green Moment Is Over

Over the past five years, Europe’s collection of green parties wielded influence in the European Parliament far beyond their numerical strength. The 70-odd parliamentarians in the Greens/European Free Alliance (EFA) political group, backed by the continent’s energetic climate movement, even managed to push through their top agenda item—the ambitious European Green Deal, designed to ensure the continent meets its climate policy targets. Politicians of the green movement often “punched above their weight,” said Anna Cavazzini, parliamentarian from Germany’s Greens, in an interview with Foreign Policy.

But after the EU’s parliamentary elections from June 6 to June 9, when the bloc’s 373 million voters will head to the polls, the greens may receive their comeuppance. Pedro López, spokesperson of the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), told Foreign Policy that the greens were “overrepresented in the parliament in relation with the political weight they have in national governments,” and that their proposals were “far too radical and too fast for people to digest.” He added, “The next five years look very bad for them.”

According to Politico’s poll of polls, the Greens/EFA could fall to 41 seats after the June election, and if the group’s performance in recent national elections across Europe is an indicator of what’s to come next week, López may be right. In Luxembourg last year, the Greens’ vote share fell to 8.6 percent from 15.1 percent in 2018. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s far-right Party for Freedom scored above a coalition of socialist and green parties led by former European Commissioner for Climate Action Frans Timmermans. And in regional elections in Bavaria and Hesse in Germany, which is the movement’s biggest national stronghold, the far right made deeper inroads when fewer Germans opted for the Greens.

If Europe’s pro-industry center-right forms an alliance with anti-climate far-right parties, the greens will likely be pushed to the backbenches. And regardless of the election outcome, Brussels seems likely to remain preoccupied with making preparations against the Russian threat, prioritizing defense over green objectives.

There are many reasons for the decline of the greens.

Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy minister and one of the most influential green politicians in Europe, admitted in a September interview with the Guardian that the movement must ditch what the interviewer described as a “moral superiority complex” and try not to make an impression of always knowing best. Another European Parliament insider who asked to remain anonymous told Foreign Policy that the greens are always on a high horse and difficult to work with. “They want too much,” he said, and they “don’t follow the political principle of give and take.”

Primarily, however, the greens have been cast in a negative light by the far right, which has exploited and exacerbated the confusion and concern over the impact of the green transition on households, industry, workers, and farmers for its own political benefit.

In 2023, for example, Germans—by far seen as the more pro-environment populace in the continent—protested against a new heating law or Heizungsgesetz, which said that newly installed home heating systems must run on at least 65 percent renewable energy. Encumbered by higher energy bills, many in Germany resisted the idea of spending more up front to refurbish their homes, which is often necessary to install environmentally friendly heat pumps. But the far right turned the issue into a political ploy. German tabloid Bild equated Habeck to the Stasi—former Eastern Germany’s secret police—and accused his party of imposing its decisions on people and invading their privacy.

Cavazzini, who spoke to Foreign Policy over the phone in the middle of campaign meetings in Saxony, said that a copy of a draft bill was “leaked to the press” to deliberately cause an uproar and hurt the Greens. It made people feel that they would be “left alone with the financial burden,” she added. However, she also said that the Greens should have “more proactively included the social dimension in the law.”

“Nevertheless,” Cavazzini added, “the debate about the law was blown up and accelerated with fake news by tabloids and the right wing.”

The law, nonetheless, is believed to have damaged the reputation of Germany’s Greens, which had finally risen to power in the governing coalition, with five major ministries helmed by its politicians.

But the green movement, while accused of demanding too much, is paradoxically also vilified for compromising. Experts believe that the German Greens fell in the estimation of some of their ardent followers when Habeck agreed to keep the coal plants running to make up for the loss of Russian energy imports.

Then came the farmers’ protests. In many parts of Europe, farmers dumped manure on streets over a horde of issues, including demands to reduce their carbon footprint. They refused new EU requirements to leave 4 percent of the land uncultivated and to reduce the use of pesticides as well as cuts to diesel subsidies. The French and German governments and Ursula von der Leyen—a member of the EPP and the European Commission’s president—caved in on a number of demands and watered down many policies intended to save the environment and mitigate climate change.

Even though von der Leyen herself is considered a pro-climate EU commissioner, she has rattled the green movement by opening the door to an alliance with the populist right, with major ramifications for the implementation of the European Green Deal. “She is playing with fire,” Cavazzini added.

Experts contend that the Green Deal was a result of fierce negotiations between the conservatives of the EPP and the Greens/EFA. But the cooperation was already fragile, and it will be weakened further if the polls turn out to be right and von der Leyen chooses to lean more to the right.

In a report published earlier this year, the European Council on Foreign Relations predicted that the “biggest policy implications of the 2024 European Parliament elections are likely to concern environmental policy.”

In the current parliament, a center-left coalition of the socialists, the greens, liberals, and the left won on environmental policy issues, “but many of these votes have been won by very small margins,” the report noted.

If the balance was to tilt further right and the center-right formed a coalition with the populist or far-right dispensations, then the European Green Deal may be put on a back burner, and the goal of achieving net zero emissions from the continent by 2050 delayed.

However, if von der Leyen instead forms a coalition with the green movement, she could, according to numbers in latest polls, retain her rank and push forth on the Green Deal, which is seen as the flagship project of her presidency.

“It will give us leverage,” Cavazzini said, but added that the Greens/EFA will vote for von der Leyen as European Commission president only if she chooses not to cooperate with the far right, puts an end to the backlash by the EPP against the Green Deal, and instead “strengthens and implements it in an ambitious way.”

In 2019, the Greens/EFA did not vote for Von Der Leyen to be the commission president, but the group warmed up to her after she made pledges to usher in more climate-friendly policies. While many of the Greens/EFA members still see themselves as “kingmakers”  so do members of the populist far-right grouping of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists.

“We have found the greens to be unreliable partners,” said López, the EPP spokesperson. The EPP is the largest group in the European Parliament, and its support is critical to the Green Deal. However, in tandem with the resurgence of the far right in Europe, the EPP has become more critical of green legislation, and support for the movement seems to be waning.

Ariadna Rodrigo, a campaigner for Greenpeace, said that regardless of the suggested decline of the green parties, there is growing support among Europeans for a greener planet. “It doesn’t mean people don’t like green policies, but that a political party hasn’t managed to convince people of its policies,” she told Foreign Policy.

According to an EU Eurobarometer survey published last year, climate change is one of the top three concerns of Europeans—even despite the Russian threat. The survey revealed that 93 percent of EU citizens polled viewed climate change as a “serious problem,” and 77 percent of those polled saw it as a “very serious problem.” While 67 percent thought their national governments were not doing enough to tackle the crisis, more than 87 percent thought that the EU should take action to increase renewable energy usage.

In the end, whichever alliance dominates the European Parliament—and whether the Greens/EFA are a part of it or outside—delaying green policies could prove to be “catastrophic,” according to the EU’s environment agency.

“Hundreds of thousands of people would die from heatwaves, and economic losses from coastal floods alone could exceed EUR 1 trillion [$1.08 trillion] per year,” warned the European Environment Agency in a report published in March, likely hoping that the next commission and parliament would take its assessment seriously.

The key task for the next European Commission is to find the money to cushion the impact of the transition on people who may lose their jobs, or are already struggling to get by. But there is also room for introspection among the members of the greens movement themselves. Being right is not enough in politics. To implement laws that will transform the way that people live, they also need to be liked.