After right-wing parties won big in last June’s EU election, the European Commission swapped greenness for competitiveness. Its first big initiative, a “Competitiveness Compass,” bluntly pointed in that direction. Fighting deindustrialization was now the priority.
The European Parliament is rowing in the same direction. And no group has changed course more radically than the center-right European People’s Party — Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s political family and the largest bloc in both the Parliament and around the EU’s table of national leaders.
EPP support, both in the Parliament and in governments across the continent, was essential to the passage of climate legislation over the past five years. But the party is now going after some of the very rules it helped approve.
EPP factions, particularly those from Central and Eastern Europe, have long criticized the Green Deal for being too ambitious. But these days, the party’s Western European wings — in particular the Germans — are joining in, citing industry complaints.
A watershed moment came last month at a gathering of national EPP leaders in Berlin. Officials from Germany’s Christian Democrats — who are favored to take power after Germany’s Feb. 23 snap general election — distributed a statement committing the group to severely weakening several pillars of the Green Deal, from renewable energy targets to the EU’s carbon border tax.
The leaders, according to an EU diplomat in the room who was not authorized to speak publicly about the private meeting, accepted the German paper with few quibbles. Including von der Leyen, for whom the Green Deal is a core legacy.
