EU conservatives’ anti-Green Deal push falls short
STRASBOURG — In an extremely tight vote on Wednesday, lawmakers in the European Parliament sent a message to their conservative colleagues: Don’t mess with the Green Deal.
The result — after a bruising debate — saw MEPs fend off a deeply polarizing right-wing effort to kill EU legislation aimed at restoring nature.
It was an embarrassing outcome for European People’s Party leader Manfred Weber, who for months had plotted to ensure the Parliament would torpedo the proposal, arguing against scientists and the Commission that it will destroy farmers’ livelihoods and put food security at risk.
“We have fought for our convictions and we came very close,” Weber said at a press conference, seeking to downplay the defeat, which saw 15 of the EPP’s 176 members breaking ranks by refusing to kill the bill outright.
The campaign saw Weber square off with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, a fellow EPP member and the Green Deal’s original architect. Von der Leyen, who attracted criticism from left-leaning MEPs for not publicly defending her flagship environmental proposal, held private meetings with MEPs ahead of the vote, according to her spokesperson Eric Mamer.
The tight result showed that the fledgling alliance Weber had built to send the bill back to the drawing board — spanning business-minded liberals, conservatives and the far right — wasn’t robust enough to kill off one of the flagship initiatives of the EU’s Green Deal.
Lead negotiator César Luena, a member of the Socialists & Democrats, punched the air with both fists and broke into a huge grin after the EPP’s first attempt to reject the law was defeated by just 12 votes. “This is a huge victory,” he told reporters after a second vote saw the entire amended proposal accepted by 336 votes to 300.
But the nail-biting vote also highlighted the fragility of the majority in favor of the bloc’s green agenda and foreshadows more closely-run climate fights in future.
As Europe veers to the right, with populist farmers’ parties threatening to take votes away from traditional conservatives in places like the Netherlands, there are signs that the margins in favor of far-reaching Green Deal laws are thinning.
The EPP came out of the vote vowing to keep fighting and to double down on its efforts to place a padlock on new green laws it considers harmful to the economy.
Speaking to reporters, Weber declared Wednesday’s vote “an empty win” for the Greens, arguing that “a lot of our concerns are now accepted, are now supported by a majority.”
Green hangover
Lawmakers and campaigners have pointed out that the left-wing alliance’s victory came at a high cost: stripping the proposal — which wants countries to implement measures to put at least 20 percent of EU marine and terrestrial ecosystems back to a good natural state by 2030 — of its ambition.
“We’re very relieved that we do have a law,” the Greens’ lead MEP on the file, Jutta Paulus, told POLITICO as she came out of the plenary room. “It is better to have weak law than to have no law.”
But Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg wasn’t enthusiastic.
“I think this is a bittersweet victory,” she told POLITICO outside the chamber, having arrived to put pressure on lawmakers. “It’s absurd that we have to fight for the bare minimum. Of course it’s positive that the law went through but it’s so weakened now,” she said. “Without nature there is no future.”
Some lawmakers fear that the EPP won’t stop at nature restoration.
Other pieces of key Green Deal legislation — such as a law to slash pesticide use — are likely to remain in the EPP’s sights ahead of next year’s election, given the group has gone all-in to portray itself as a defender of farmers’ interests.
“We might come to a similar situation [on other green files], with very tight majorities,” said Paulus, adding that she hopes the “EPP rethink their strategy and say: ‘OK, let’s try to be constructive.’”
The EU’s Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans — who hails from the Socialist camp — said the outcome was a lesson for the EPP about flirting with the far right. “My honest hope is that the experience of today shows that for the center-right, being in the center working with us is politically better in the long run,” he told POLITICO.
Striking an optimistic tone earlier in the day, Timmermans told reporters that passing the nature restoration law could actually unlock ongoing negotiations on other contentious files. “I hope this will also help us get across the line other proposals that we have made,” he said.
Cracks in the EPP
Despite rumblings of discontent about the way that Weber spearheaded this campaign — having staked so much political capital on this vote and lost — even MEPs who defied him and supported the bill conceded that the German’s tactics paid off.
“Obviously, the EPP got the call wrong, and Manfred as leader would have been instrumental in that,” said MEP Seán Kelly, who heads the Irish delegation within the EPP and supported the legislation.
But the group’s “maneuvering” — pushing to drastically modify the proposal — “helped our team to deliver perhaps a better outcome,” he argued.
“The important thing now is that EPP and Manfred Weber accept the outcome of the Parliament, and get back in [negotiation] and try and ensure that the trilogues reflect the position adopted,” Kelly said.
Weber on Wednesday left open the possibility that his group could still try to frustrate the bill in the coming months as it winds its way through negotiations with the Council, asking: “Can [we] finally arrive [at] a convincing final outcome on our desk?”
He also dodged a question about a proxy war with fellow EPP heavyweight von der Leyen, insisting on Tuesday ahead of the vote that “we are in regular, intensive, positive, good dialogue.”
