The fate of Europe’s historic climate mission and its political firewall against the far right are now intertwined.
Europe’s attempts to reignite its fading industries have created a motley but energetic crew of business interests, centrist political leaders and far-right crusaders — all of whom want to reset the EU’s Green Deal, a package of laws aimed at zeroing out greenhouse gases and living in harmony with nature.
Yet they are divided on the remedies — and even on whether they want to work together.
Business leaders want to strip regulations and punishments for polluters without revising the EU’s broader climate goals.
Center-right figures are sympathetic to those pleas but insist they won’t work with the far right to make it happen.
Far-right leaders think that reluctance won’t last forever. Shared Green Deal antipathy, they believe, might even birth a new right-wing coalition. That would serve a larger goal of their movement: tearing down the cordon sanitaire, a taboo that prohibits Europe’s centrist parties from collaborating with the far right.
“I think that they are moving to our position,” said Czech European Parliament member Alexandr Vondra, referencing his belief that the center right is drifting toward his hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group. “I think they are reading the political signals.”
One thing these protagonists do share is a sense of ascendency. In the five years since its inception, the European Green Deal has faced opposition and criticism from all sides. It has never, however, faced a serious prospect of being severely weakened or reversed — until now.
“The revolt against regulation is inevitable!” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote on X Tuesday. “Whether someone in the EU likes it or not. The time is now!”
Corporate demands
European industry groups have been sounding the alarm for years over what they describe as the excessive burdens imposed by the Green Deal, which they say damage their businesses and contribute to the EU’s economic malaise.
“Many CEOs tell me, ‘I mean, what the heck? In the rest of the world, we can do our job. And in Europe, we spend more and more time to fill in useless papers,’” said Markus Beyrer, the Austrian director general of BusinessEurope, a lobbying body for EU industries.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s desire to smash regulation and government oversight has deepened those concerns.
Gone is the idea that the EU can regulate first and subsequently draw the world into a high-standards race to the top — once wishfully dubbed the “Brussels effect.”
That concept “was probably also not realistic a couple of years ago,” Beyrer said. “It seems to be totally unrealistic now.”
The chemicals industry has played a key role in building a coordinated resistance.
In February 2024, the EU’s top chemical lobby, CEFIC, rallied together 73 industry bosses to sign the so-called Antwerp Declaration, a cross-sector call to make competitiveness the central focus following June’s EU election.
Their suggestion? Cut red tape and “eliminate regulatory incoherence.” Nearly 1,300 organizations eventually backed the manifesto.
By January this year, BusinessEurope had identified 68 EU policies to be overhauled, nearly half of them environmental laws. They asked for simpler compliance procedures, pleaded for weaker green rules, and requested delays to pending laws.
Last week, the European Commission, the EU’s executive in Brussels, convened a roundtable to discuss amending the Green Deal. Green groups lamented that the attendance list favored heavy polluters.
“We stand by the goals of the Green Deal,” said BusinessEurope’s Beyrer. “But we have very much criticized the way it has been implemented because what we have seen is a partly uncoordinated, multi-headed avalanche of rules creating way more burden … This is what we need to clean up.”
We’re listening …
The EU, and the parties running it, are heeding the call.
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.
“It wasn’t even up for discussion,” the diplomat said.
After that, several high-profile EPP figures started talking about suspending or rolling back the Green Deal. Tusk, the Polish prime minister and one of the bloc’s most powerful leaders, called for a “full and very critical review” of the entire project. Notably, Poland currently holds the EU’s six-month rotating presidency, giving it the authority to guide policy talks in Brussels.
The EPP is “basically in sync” over the need for “deep reform” said a Polish official, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “And Tusk, being a high-profile politician within the EPP, is just going with the same focus as politicians in Berlin. So it’s orchestrated.”
The behavior is empowering far-right forces, warned Frans Timmermans, a major green policy architect as the EU’s former Green Deal commissioner.
“The Green Deal very often was claimed by the European People’s Party as their project,” he said during a visit to Brussels last week. “Where has that gone? What’s changed? Has the project changed or has the EPP changed? … If the center right starts to mimic the radical right. It’s the radical right that wins.”
EPP politicians have even targeted EU funding for green NGOs, spouting largely unfounded allegations that Brussels paid groups to lobby for the Green Deal. (A POLITICO analysis found no such arrangements.)
This antagonism makes the EPP’s Green Deal position difficult to pin down. Adding to the complexity are the disparate views held within the group and its affiliate parties across the continent. Moreover, despite their broad and mounting criticism, most EPP politicians still argue the Green Deal is both necessary and actually benefits the EU economy.
“If our competitiveness is based on cheap oil and gas, we will never be competitive,” said Radan Kanev, a Bulgarian EPP member of the European Parliament. “We have to complete the Green Deal, not repeal it.”
That’s putting enormous pressure on the EU executive, which must deliver a proposal this month that treads a narrow path.
“There’s a political push from part of the right and the far right to deregulate and question the climate targets,” said a Commission official who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “That is not the intent of this Commission. We’re changing the way, not the goal.”
The goal appears to be a delicate act of paring back some reporting requirements without reopening whole swathes of laws — all without empowering the far right. In practice, that means focusing more on reducing corporate reporting requirements, and less on delaying major new rules. But there is no guarantee that would satisfy the EPP’s deregulation hawks.
An eventual European Parliament vote on simplified disclosure rules will test the centrist majority that has sat at the heart of EU policymaking for decades, said Pascal Canfin, a centrist MEP from the Renew group who played a major role in passing the Green Deal during the last parliamentary term.
If the Commission proposes a deal that will only pass with far-right support, it doesn’t really matter whether the cordon sanitaire technically still exists. It will, in effect, have crumbled.
That would rock the EU to its core.
“That would be the very first time — to my analysis — [in] the Commission’s history where we would have a proposal designed with an EPP-extreme-right majority,” Canfin said. “It is absolutely unstable. Absolutely unstable.”
Join us and win
The far right has been working hard to promote a sense of alignment between itself and other Green Deal critics.
Far-right politicians and right-wing media are eagerly echoing the EPP’s deregulation rhetoric and its tenuous attacks on green NGOs. In the EU capital, MCC Brussels, a think tank linked to Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán, is trumpeting the cause.
For them, the Green Deal has become a vehicle to push a broader message.
“What we’re facing here is a confrontation with an entire system, an entire system of elites and a system of ideas,” said the head of policy at MCC Brussels, Jacob Reynolds.
In January, French far-right leader Jordan Bardella — a figurehead of the Parliament’s Patriots for Europe group and a protégé of French nationalist leader Marine Le Pen — tested whether the cordon sanitaire was ready to fall.
He wrote to the leaders of other right-of-center groups in the Parliament, appealing to their “common values” and inviting them to inaugurate a right-wing majority and suspend the Green Deal.
One group, the right-wing ECR, jumped at the offer, writing back to say the groups should “build bridges across political lines.”
“Building fences just means feeding carnivores behind the fence, and one day they will break the fence anyway,” said Vondra, the Czech ECR member. The ECR, however, later declined to formally back the Patriots’ proposal in closed-door discussions, according to POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook.
Bardella didn’t address his letter to industry groups. BusinessEurope’s Beyrer did not rule out working with far-right parties to pursue his member’s agenda with “common-sense” allies, citing the ECR in particular.
“Europe is brought forward by the center pro-European forces,” he said. “But this doesn’t mean that everything which is right of the EPP is the devil.”
The EPP did not publicly respond, but German MEP Peter Liese, a senior environmental spokesperson for the group, told POLITICO the idea was a non-starter. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the EPP won’t find common cause in the coming weeks.
“Pragmatism will lead the EPP to change their minds,” predicted MCC Brussels Executive Director Frank Füredi. “You really sense that the days of the cordon sanitaire are numbered.”
This story has been updated with additional information from Markus Beyrer’s interview.
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