The latest act in the EU’s long-running farce concerning Central European member states was played out on Monday. The Austrian environment minister, Leonore Gewessler of the Green party, at the very last moment abandoned her coalition government’s agreed position and voted to approve the EU’s “nature restoration law”, the flagship policy of the EU’s Green Deal. This aims to make the bloc carbon-neutral by 2050.
The law itself has been extremely controversial.
While EU environmentalists insist that Europe lacks green space, that 80 per cent of habitats are in a poor condition, that 10 per cent of bee and butterfly species are in danger of extinction and that 70 per cent of soils are in an unhealthy state, European farmers everywhere have been violently protesting against EU agricultural and environmental policy (even overturning the government in the Netherlands).
In the recent European elections the swing was to hard Right parties known for their eco-scepticism. Indeed, before the European elections under pressure from the centre-Right European People’s Party (EPP) grouping in the Strasbourg parliament, the nature restoration law was successfully watered down. Farmers who worried that they would have to set aside a certain percentage of their land for environmentally friendly measures no longer have that to fear.
As it now stands the new law concentrates on tracts of land suitable for carbon capture and storage and preventing natural disasters.
After the compromises negotiated by the EPP, the European Parliament passed the law by 329 votes to 275. The question now became whether it could secure a weighted majority in the Council of Ministers (55 per cent of member states, representing at least 65 per cent of the EU’s population).
In March the vote had been postponed when Hungary went over to the opposition. Then on Monday, the vote was secured when, defying her government, Gewessler cast Austria’s vote in favour.
Inevitably, this created an immediate outcry in Vienna. The Greens are the junior partner in a coalition with the centre-Right. Chancellor Karl Nehammer of the Austrian People’s Party denounced her vote as illegal and unconstitutional. He wrote to Brussels saying so and threatened to appeal to the European Court of Justice. But Brussels was having none of it. The vote, he was told, stood. His quarrel with his minister was simply a “domestic affair”.
But it is an affair of some importance. Austria will hold a federal election on September 29. Gewessler clearly calculated she could not face her Green voters having just vetoed the nature reconstruction law. Hence her public appeal to conscience, nature and future generations which overrode, she maintained, any constitutional obligations.
The Freedom Party opposition leader, Herbert Kickl, who is leading in the polls and whose party came first in the European elections, demanded at the very least that Gewessler should be sacked. He also tabled a vote of no confidence against her and claimed this must be the final instance of the Greens in coalition leading the conservatives by the nose. The conservative Chancellor however said that the coalition would continue. In truth he had little choice.
Will any of this make any difference to Europe or Austria? Probably not. It will certainly not help the “unstoppable” (the adjective of the Austrian Alpine Club) de-icing of Austria, whose glaciers are forecast to disappear in the next 40-45 years. The country’s largest one, the Pasterze – in the Glockner Mountains of Carinthia – shrank by a record 668 feet last year.