EPP’s Weber vows to push to scrap combustion engine ban in talks in coming days.
BRUSSELS — The newly-buoyed right wasted no time in firing its first shot at the EU’s flagship package of green laws, minutes after proclaiming victory Sunday night in the European election.
In the crosshairs: A 2035 ban on the sale of combustion engine cars — a central pillar of the Green Deal’s plan to cut planet-warming emissions on Europe’s roadways.
It was the first thing mentioned by Manfred Weber, leader of the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), which grabbed the most European Parliament seats in the election, as he walked out of a boisterous election night party in Brussels.
The ban, he told POLITICO, was a “mistake,” promising the party would discuss rolling it back in “upcoming days.”
The vow drove home the complete reversal that has taken place since the last EU election in 2019, which saw all leaders apart from the far right compete for green credibility as climate activists marched in the streets.
Now, the EU’s historic plans to constrain global warming are under attack after an election where parties across the right surged while Europe’s Greens cratered.
Peter Liese, the EPP’s lead climate lawmaker, told POLITICO the election results vindicated his party’s vision for a less restrictive Green Deal — the EU’s landmark plan to zero out greenhouse gas pollution by 2050.
“We’ll need to make some adjustments. The ban on combustion engines — that needs to go,” he said. Another critical area will be agriculture, which the EPP has vowed to protect from more aggressive climate regulation.
It won’t be that easy, though. Undoing the car ban would directly contradict the EPP’s lead candidate, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who introduced the ban and backed it as she campaigned for a second five-year term as the EU’s top executive. Any move to scrap the law would also start an all-out war with left-wing parties that supported the move.
Messiness aside, one thing is now certain, according to Liese: “There won’t be any more decisions made without the EPP.”
Alexandr Vondra, a Czech MEP who has worked on climate legislation for the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, said that climate policy would become more “realistic” over the next five years.
“If I compare Green Deal policymaking to driving a car, I expect the new European Parliament will also use a steering wheel or braking pedal, not just the gas pedal,” he said.
Pascal Canfin, a centrist French MEP who served as chair of the Parliament’s environment committee during the last term, insisted that the election didn’t produce “a majority to dismantle the Green Deal.”
Others weren’t so sure.
“The Green Deal isn’t dead. But we’ll need to see what the coming weeks will bring,” said Michael Bloss, a German Green MEP. “If there are majorities where right-wing parties are involved, backsliding is a possibility.”
Liese said the EPP was determined to reduce the EU’s contribution to global warming to zero by 2050, as required by the bloc’s climate targets.
“If progress is equated with bans, there will be backsliding,” he said. “No backsliding in terms of climate targets, but in terms of bans and bureaucracy, yes.”
Von der Leyen will now pitch for a second term running the EU executive branch, which will require backing from the European Parliament.
To get there, von der Leyen will try to build a coalition of parties from the center left and the EPP. But if she loses even a handful of seats from those parties, she may not get the majority she needs. That means she may look to deal with the Greens or the hard right.
Either way, the Green Deal promises to be a major stumbling block. The Greens’ lead candidate, Bas Eickhout, said his party would not support any rollback of existing laws, including the combustion engine ban.
“She will need another party. That could be us of course,” he said, adding that “for us, it’s quite clear that the laws that have been adopted need to stay on course and I think this is also what companies want.”
The Green Deal is a complex package of laws governing greenhouse gas emissions from almost every part of the economy, but it also touches on many other industrial pollutants. The vast majority of the package has already gone through Parliament and Weber said the EPP was not aiming to dissolve the deal in its entirety.
“There will be no revision of the Green Deal as a whole,” he said.
That means parties that broadly support the Green Deal still command an easy majority in Parliament.
But the EU’s independent science advisers have highlighted the need to not only maintain the existing policies but to do much more, especially on farming emissions. Noisy tractor demonstrations in capitals earlier this year brought efforts to control the agriculture industry’s impact on the environment to a screeching halt.
At the Greens election night watch party in Brussels on Sunday, the room fell silent when the first results came out of Germany. The party slipped from second to fourth, well behind the far-right Alternative for Germany.
Germans ranked peace, social security and immigration as decisive issues for their voting behavior. Climate change, which held the top place in 2019, sank to fourth, even though two-thirds of people said they feared global warming would destroy their livelihoods.
In France, the Greens flirted with complete elimination, hovering around the 5 percent threshold needed to secure any European Parliament seats. At the Greens watch party back in Brussels, people broke out in cheers and applause when the French polls came in — a telling moment, given they were celebrating a stay of execution, not a win.
Indeed, concerns over climate change’s devastating fallout — predicted by scientists and apparent in proliferating floods, fires and deadly heat — simply aren’t driving the political agenda as they did when the EU last held elections in 2019.
“I would say it’s still a concern of a lot of people,” said Eickhout, the Greens’ lead candidate. “But it’s not the top concern.”
The alleged quid pro quo, which Brussels denies, is the latest twist behind a major nature restoration bill that finally passed on Monday.
If she can’t win over the entire centrist coalition, the EU’s top executive will need the Greens or even the hard right. Both options are fraught.
Has the European Commission president given up on her green agenda going into a possible second term — or is she just biding her time?
Peter Liese, the EPP’s top green policy MEP, told POLITICO he was “not enthusiastic” about Spanish socialist Teresa Ribera’s campaign to run the EU’s Green Deal.