Euro-elections demand progress, not prevarication

The far-right challenge in the European elections was overblown. Just transition, rather than rowing back, is the answer.

‘Kiss goodbye to the European Green Deal,’ Simon Hix of the European University Institute glibly remarked as the results of the European elections rolled in. Voters had swung to the far right, with a backlash against ‘net zero’ European Union policies on greenhouse-gas emissions, as pundits far and wide had predicted. But had they?

As backdrop, over the next five years and beyond, Europe’s climate challenges, including industrial renewal, will intensify rather than abate, in the face of accelerating competition from the Unites States and China. Three days after the elections concluded, the EU slapped an extra 38.1 per cent tariff on electric vehicles from China in a desperate protectionist response. Europe’s global economic ambitions will need more than trade defence measures to succeed.

The US Inflation Reduction Act aims, alongside other measures, to inject $2 trillion into the fight against climate change and reboot American economic competitiveness. The Chinese state investment project often known as Made in China 2025 is on a similar scale. To these the rich panoply of green industrial-strategy plans put forward by the outgoing European Commission—notably by Thierry Breton, commissioner for the internal market—remains a necessary, indeed often overdue, response.

The twin green and digital transition cannot be held back by prevarication on the part of the EU leadership. Investment support for fossil-fuel technology and industry would prove a recipe for continuing economic stagnation, declining productivity and innovation—and even greater voter frustration and disenchantment.

Confirmation bias

Journalists and commentators display a growing tendency towards what psychologists call confirmation bias, notably on ‘social media’: having predicted chaos, even apocalypse, they find it in the real world regardless. So it was on June 9th when the election results emerged. Of course, in the two big ‘locomotive states’, Germany and France, the far right did well but no better than forecast. Elsewhere, in some cases, the greens did pretty well—notably Denmark and the Netherlands, in both of which red-green politics pipped other forces.

In Germany Alternative für Deutschland, despite recent scandals, polled 15.9 per cent. Yet that was below its peak of around 20 per cent in some polls and half the support for the conservative CDU/CSU union, which has ruled Germany for most of the past 34 post-unification years, on 31 per cent. The social-democratic SPD, led by the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, slumped to 13.9 per cent; his coalition partners the Greens (which had outpolled the SPD occasionally) dwindled to 11.9 per cent and the liberal Free Democrats to 5.2 per cent. In some western-German university cities and towns AfD support was in the mid-single digits—hardly a breakthrough on the scale of the Nazi party 90 years ago but reflecting deep dissatisfaction with a hugely under-performing German economy.

Meanwhile in France, the National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen / Jordan Bardella, as predicted, topped the polls, with 31.4 per cent and 30 of the country’s 81 seats. The Renew party of the president, Emmanuel Macron, came second on 14.6 per cent and 13 seats, while in support of Raphaël Glucksmann as candidate the socialists staged a mini-recovery to 13.8 per cent and 13 seats. The green EELV won just 5.5 per cent or the same as the populist Reconquest of Eric Zemmour. The obvious question now is whether RN can maintain or increase that momentum in the snap general election which has been called by Macron in the hope that it won’t—against it a ‘popular front’ of the left and the greens emerged this week.

Overall, with EU-wide turnout up marginally at 51.01 per cent, this was not the Zeitenwende promoted in febrile reportage. The centrist coalition of the three biggest parties in the European Parliament holds 403 of the 720 seats, with the centre-right European People’s Party up 13 to 189 and the Socialists & Democrats down just three to 135. Feverish speculation that the EPP would combine with the far right to form a new majority for the next five-year cycle appears wide of the mark—on verra.

Just transition

In 2019 Ursula von der Leyen finally scraped home as commission president, with just nine more votes than required, promising a ‘geopolitical’ commission. At its heart was to be the economic transition exemplified by the Green Deal, designed to transform Europe’s economy and industry and combat climate change—what became the ‘Fit for 55’ legislative agenda—in a manner setting the pace for the rest of the world and ending stagnation and apathy.

Five years (almost) later we can hardly hail a huge success story, as the elections underline. And voters in the now-departed United Kingdom (as in the US) remain profoundly demotivated—frequently to the point of near-despair—at the lack of progress in overcoming successive crises, not least widening income and wealth inequality. But there is a strong sense, too, that Europe’s 370 million voters accept, in their majority, that greening the economy in the battle against global heating is ineluctable.

In the next EU legislative cycle, to 2029, this greening (plus digital transformation) must continue. But it must come with greater sensitivity towards public readiness, with a much bigger emphasis on informing and educating and, above all, on socio-economic justice. The much-heralded just transition should be the Leitmotif of the next five years. This is a much better response than the rowing back on green ambition which, seeking a renewed mandate, von der Leyen (as in the UK the Labour leader, Keir Starmer), has articulated.

In my home country of Scotland, for instance, where most parties endorse a green policy agenda in some shape or form, an entirely spurious debate is taking place over Labour’s alleged threat to 100,000 Scottish jobs in North Sea oil and gas by upping the windfall tax on corporate profits and/or phasing out new exploration licences. This in a country and a polity that prides itself on its green goals. In reality, around 40,000 Scottish jobs might be under threat but this is to focus on a static picture.

The switch to widely available wind energy (and other renewables) could create tens of thousands of jobs. As the Scottish Trades Union Congress pointed out in a recent report, that would require £2 billion investment, including in 19 manufacturing sites. Unlike the deindustrialisation of the 1980s, new skills, jobs and investments are top of today’s agenda.

Just transition, at its core, is the right answer to the far right.

David Gow is former editor of Social Europe, editor of sceptical.scot and former German correspondent and European business editor of the Guardian.