BRUSSELS — The pope was dead. And Teresa Ribera was mourning — not only for the man.
Pope Francis had embodied an era in which Ribera’s dream of a greener world, shaped by powerful international institutions and scientific advice, had seemed, at last, to be laid down in concrete.
Ten years had passed since Ribera’s highest moment: a year that saw the drafting of the Paris Agreement on climate change and the pope’s landmark environmental proclamation that made the moral case for action.
By the time Francis died in April, Ribera was trying to stop it all from being torn down.
Since arriving in Brussels in December to run the EU’s green and competition policy, she has fought a battle — largely in secret — against opponents who fret that the EU’s efforts to tackle climate change are unaffordable, or that they hand populists an easy win.
Her influence shone through this week as the European Commission faced down the French president, discontent from the EU’s largest political force, and the certainty of a far-right backlash to present a new climate goal for Europe.
Ribera pitched the proposed target, an emissions-cutting milestone for 2040, as countering the growing pushback against ambitious climate action.
“For all those challenging the science, hiding the problems, asking to postpone, thinking that the world is going to remain as it is and that the market is going to solve everything … the response coming from Europe is very clear,” she said at a press conference Wednesday.
But political pressure had prompted the Commission to soften the target with concessions to governments, notably a contentious proposal to outsource part of the bloc’s efforts to poorer countries.
It was, like Ribera’s first seven months in office, a compromise born of the changed political reality — a reality she has tried to both resist and work within.
This account of that time is based on interviews with 11 Commission and government officials, associates of Ribera and close observers of the EU. Many were hesitant to speak to journalists about Ribera, who fiercely values privacy and loyalty, so they were granted anonymity. POLITICO has also interviewed Ribera three times in that span.
Allies and critics alike described Ribera as isolated, lacking political allies amid losses among her fellow social democrats, and facing attacks from outside and inside the Commission. Despite this, they said, she has racked up a series of quiet victories.
With populist and illiberal parties incorporating the fight against climate change into their story of grievance, the stakes, as Ribera sees them, are wider than the EU’s green goals. Almost religious. Certainly moral.
“Today, like never before, the green agenda … is being questioned,” she wrote in an emotionally charged letter to El País two days after Pope Francis died. This “counter-reformation,” she added, must be faced down lest the world “return to dark times.”
You’re hired
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen knew exactly what she was getting when she asked Ribera to protect the EU’s embattled green ambitions.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez rammed home the message in a letter to von der Leyen in August 2024, nominating the two-time Spanish minister, former U.N. climate negotiator and policy expert to the Commission.
Sánchez touted her “political experience” and “extensive knowledge” of climate change, energy and environmental protection, which he said had won Ribera “great prestige internationally and nationally.” The letter was released to POLITICO under freedom of information laws.
Ribera, Sánchez enthused, could “generate consensus and agreements in complex international negotiations.”
That was useful for von der Leyen. The European Green Deal — a package of targets and regulations covering almost every sector of the European economy — was a key part of the president’s legislative legacy. Laid down over the previous five years, it not only set a course to end Europe’s contribution to climate change by mid-century, but also sought to rebalance the impact of industry and agriculture on nature.
Both von der Leyen and Ribera knew trouble was looming.
The 2024 European election elevated far-right parliamentarians — the very agents of the counter-reformation Ribera believed she was confronting — ensuring that attacks on the green agenda would escalate. And von der Leyen’s own center-right European People’s Party (EPP), the European Parliament’s largest force, had begun to oppose major parts of the package, citing costs to industry and the need to dull the siren call of the political extremes.
According to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions and two people briefed on the talks, von der Leyen told Ribera she was choosing her as her first executive vice president — effectively the Commission’s No. 2 — precisely because of her green credentials.
Ribera understood her job as boiling down to one overarching mission: Defend the Green Deal.
Getting to 90
Von der Leyen’s backing for Ribera showed through during the final frantic talks on the EU’s new 2040 climate goal.
Until Tuesday, the proposed law’s final form — and even its release — remained uncertain.
The target had already been delayed for months as EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, whose work is overseen by Ribera, battled to find the right set of politically viable concessions.
Months of negotiations with governments and parliamentarians led Hoekstra to suggest that the EU stick to the 90 percent cut to emissions that von der Leyen had promised last year, but outsource some of its climate efforts to poorer countries by buying carbon credits. It was a compromise Ribera disliked but eventually accepted.
Even with that concession, a groundswell of opposition arose on Monday when the proposal was presented to the rest of the commissioners and their staffs. Ribera and Hoesktra were even battling calls to delay the announcement, after French President Emmanuel Macron suggested a pause during a dinner with EU leaders the week before.
That dinner was “a big moment,” said one EU official familiar with the internal discussions. “It signaled to everyone that big countries aren’t … on the Commission’s side.”
During the meal, von der Leyen pushed back against Macron, defending the target and insisting it needed to be proposed that week, three people briefed on the discussions said.
She made the same case this week to wavering commissioners, who eventually fell in line on Tuesday. Hoekstra and Ribera got their compromise.
In the trenches
Ribera has fought many such battles over the last seven months.
She has tried to act as a lawyerly guard dog, apprehending Commission papers and ensuring they align with the EU’s previous green commitments.
Ribera has not always had the full backing of von der Leyen, who has been willing to sacrifice a growing number of green regulations to accommodate EPP concerns while trying to preserve core climate goals.
Despite this, Ribera has won significant victories.
In January, an early draft of von der Leyen’s grand second-term economic doctrine — the so-called Competitiveness Compass — contained only a few nebulous green references while stressing deregulation. Ribera intervened to ensure the final version specifically referenced threatened green policy initiatives.
A month later, the Commission launched an “omnibus” bill to reduce bureaucratic burdens on companies. The bill watered down green finance rules and corporate reporting standards. But it would have gone even further, leaving key rules entirely voluntary and therefore toothless, had it not been for Ribera’s backroom dealing, POLITICO reported in February.
Ribera also went on to battle behind the scenes to try to salvage a sinking greenwashing law.
At the same time, she rebelled against the EU’s public stance on issues such as Gaza, LGBTQ+ rights and migration.
In May, after rumors circulated that von der Leyen was asking commissioners not to attend the banned Budapest Pride, Ribera demonstratively showed up at a press conference on climate progress with a rainbow-striped notebook.
On social media site Bluesky she expressed solidarity with the Hungarian LGBTQ+ community months before von der Leyen finally did. She frequently issues posts highlighting the misery in Gaza, sometimes criticizing Israel outright, as well as Trump’s crackdown on scientific research and universities. She endorsed an op-ed by former Spanish EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell condemning the bloc’s inaction on Gaza, and expressed support for migrant rescuers in the Mediterranean.
When the United States bombed Iran in June, she appeared to mourn the sidelining of the multilateral order, writing: “Decades to build an international order based on the UN charter, human rights and the rule of law.”
The lady’s not for turning
Ribera’s stand has been a lonely one.
She is unambiguously tribal in her socialist politics — notable in a shifting political landscape.
During an interview in her offices just after she had moved into the Berlaymont, POLITICO noted a 1970s photograph hanging behind the modernist suite on which the new commissioner sat. On it, then-British opposition leader and bête noire of the U.K. left Margaret Thatcher was taking a meeting on the same settee. Ribera joked that she might swap it for a picture of current Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Shortly after, the picture was gone.
The center left is in retreat in Europe. The socialists’ most powerful leader is Ribera’s political ally, Sánchez. But the Spanish prime minister has been weakened by a series of poor election results, a fractious coalition and, more recently, a major corruption scandal. Encouraged, Ribera’s domestic opponents on the right and far right have mounted a savage campaign against her in the press.
Election losses have also whittled down the cadre of politicians with whom Ribera championed the Green Deal as a Spanish minister. Gone are allies in Germany, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands.
On the international level, the global order Ribera helped shape is also under profound stress — both from the White House and by populists across the EU. She has tried to tread lightly, withholding any open disdain for U.S. President Donald Trump and his enablers. But she has also not used Elon Musk’s social network X since December.
“She seemed more tired and frustrated than the last time I saw her,” said a former government official from an EU country who met Ribera recently.
Ribera draws on two experiences for perspective in times of adversity. Her long experience of U.N. climate talks, which have seen many setbacks since they began in the 1990s. And her family’s deep romance with the Atlético de Madrid football team — the Spanish capital’s perennial also-rans, who are so often overmatched by the brutal riches of neighbors Real Madrid.
Seeking friends
Nowhere is the sense of Ribera as a politician trying to hold back the tide stronger than inside the European Commission itself.
She has few allies in the College of Commissioners, the EU’s executive board that oversees the bloc’s legislation. There are just four socialists on von der Leyen’s team of 27 — five if you count Maroš Šefčovič, whose Slovak party has been suspended from the group.
The EPP dominates the college. And the Commission’s proposals have markedly shifted to incorporate right-leaning priorities.
While it’s often overstated how much the EU has backtracked on green issues — there is still broad consensus on the need to tackle climate change — the zeitgeist in Brussels, fed by intense corporate lobbying, is all about softening green regulation.
Defense, deindustrialization, deregulation … Donald. These are the “d’s” raising heartbeats in the European capital in 2025. Decarbonization gets a flat line.
The Commission argues that its recent reforms have not compromised the Green Deal’s core mission — particularly when it comes to climate. It frames the changes as “simplification,” streamlining overly burdensome requirements.
That’s at least partly a euphemism, said François Gemenne, a Belgian political scientist from the HEC Paris business school.
“Whatever they might say and proclaim, there is some backtracking at the EU level when it comes to the Green Deal,” he said.
Ribera has tried to resist that decline.
“She constantly tries to downsize the intensity of the doctrinal shift within the Commission,” a Commission official said of Ribera. It’s an unfashionable place to be “if suddenly your priority as a Commission is to make life easier for businesses [and] she believes more in tight regulation.”
Ribera “has been working in close cooperation with the President,” said Commission spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen in an emailed statement. “No College member works in isolation, politically or otherwise.”
As executive vice president, Ribera was given sweeping responsibilities by von der Leyen — but diffused power. She oversees the work of other commissioners when it relates to the Green Deal.
There are two schools of thought about von der Leyen’s intent. In one sense, the structure dilutes Ribera’s power, guarding against the kind of policy fiefdom created by Ribera’s executive vice president predecessor, Dutch socialist Frans Timmermans. On the other hand it means Green Deal decisions come with a cross-party seal, potentially blunting EPP attacks.
The shared responsibilities have inevitably bred tensions.
Hoekstra, an EPP politician who took over the climate brief in late 2023, was charged with drafting the 2040 target.
Both Ribera and Hoekstra’s teams insist they have an amicable and constructive relationship. He and Ribera were “basically aligned” on the goal, according to the EU official.
But at least twice, Ribera publicly preempted Hoekstra’s work, telling POLITICO that the final target would be 90 percent and saying it should heed the advice of a scientific advisory board that had just ruled out using international credits to meet the goal.
Meanwhile, officials from the climate department, who work for Hoekstra, have not always shared key documents from Ribera’s team. And while Hoekstra is subordinate to Ribera in von der Leyen’s org chart, Hoekstra directs the civil servants working on climate policy.
“The way I see it, Wopke Hoekstra dominates on those issues,” an EPP official said. “Ribera is a bit marginalized in the Commission. Wopke has the EPP commissioners who tend to be on his side, and Ribera, as a social democrat, is pretty much alone.”
Yet there the pair was on Wednesday, presenting their 2040 compromise together — Hoekstra in a crooked tie, Ribera unusually contained.
Yes, she acknowledged, the surge of public, political (and papal) concern that birthed the Green Deal and the Paris accord was “not the world of today.” But the EU wasn’t retreating, Ribera insisted: “We are here.”
It was the same tone she struck in her April eulogy for Pope Francis — yearning for the recent past, defending the distant future, but mired in the political problems of the present.
Karl Mathiesen reported from Brussels and London. Zia Weise reported from Brussels.
The post ‘She’s pretty much alone’: The EU’s greenest leader fights the tide appeared first on Politico.
