Never before has the European Union (EU) had such a green agenda as it has had since 2019, and yet it hasn't translated into more votes for the greens at the ballot box – quite the contrary. Their group in the European Parliament is set to have 53 seats (out of 720), compared with 71 before the elections held from June 6 to 9. As a result, the Greens, once the fourth largest political force in Strasbourg, are likely to fall back to sixth place, behind nationalist and sovereignist right-wingers.
"In 2019, climate was at the heart of the European elections. All political parties followed suit. In 2024, part of the campaign was against climate," said Dutch Green MEP Bas Eickhout. Between these two elections, the 27 member states adopted the Green Deal, over sixty pieces of legislation designed to take Europeans toward carbon neutrality by 2050. The European People's Party (EPP), Socialists, and Liberals "supported the Green Deal when it was politically costly to oppose it, before changing sides when it was no longer electorally advantageous and we were getting into the hard part of the transition," said Philippe Lamberts, outgoing president of the Green Group.
The surprise electoral victory in the Netherlands of the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) in the March 2023 provincial elections was a turning point. As it lost ground, the EPP abruptly changed positioning and made the Green Deal the political object that needed to be destroyed, as illustrated in the summer of 2023 by the battle over the Nature Restoration Act in the Strasbourg parliament.
The war in Ukraine, the ensuing surge in energy prices, the economic slowdown and rising interest rates have all changed the situation. The 27 member states feared the emergence of an Old Continent-wide protest movement, similar to France's "Yellow Vests" in the winter of 2018-2019. They also feared the looming rise of the far right. After the EPP, liberals too turned against the Green Deal, starting with Emmanuel Macron who, in May 2023, called for a "pause."
The farmers' crisis, who demonstrated their anger against the "green Brussels diktat" throughout Europe at the beginning of 2024, confirmed the end of the EU's ecological ambitions for the rural world. The environmental constraints of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) have been eased, and several texts, notably on pesticide reduction, were buried.
Against this backdrop, the Greens were bound to suffer. They lost votes in the two countries that traditionally give them large delegations. In France, they barely reached the 5% threshold needed to be represented in Strasbourg, when in 2019 they got 13.4% of the vote. The lead candidate, Marie Toussaint, acknowledged on Sunday, June 9, a "dry, bitter defeat" for an "ecology at half-mast" which, in her view, is opening "the door to all risks".
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