Bears, Cars and Angry Farmers Fuel Green Backlash

March 09, 2024

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by Karl Mathiesen, Nicolas Camut, Zia Weise, Charlie Cooper and Louise Guillot (Politico) A 28-country guide to how climate policies are splitting Europe. -- And Green parties are taking the hit — polling shows they will face deep electoral pain when EU citizens vote in June. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is also trying to run away from the green parts of her legacy. In fact, those pushing for faster action to protect the climate and nature are being left high and dry almost everywhere, fighting to recapture momentum.

According to a POLITICO survey of national debates taking place in the EU and the U.K., hard-right and center-right politicians are seeking to drive wedges between voters and the champions of green policy — fueling and feeding on a sense of grievance. They argue that climate zealotry has gone too far, too fast, that the costs are too great, or, in rarer cases, that climate change is a fantasy.

Here’s a country-by-country look at the “wedge” climate policies that are splitting European politics:

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The complaints of drivers are among their key refrains, with the EU’s looming ban on combustion engine cars a common punching bag.

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And in Estonia, one nationalist invokes Marie Antoinette to lambast the elitism he says is at the heart of the climate project.

There are also key regional differences. In the wealthy north, where climate policy is biting deeper into people’s personal choices, the blowback is rooted in a perceived affront to individual liberty. In hotter southern climes, governments are struggling to contain public anger at their inability to cope with the droughts and fires that climate change brings — although this doesn’t always equate to demands for more radical emissions cuts. While in the East, cost-of-living pressures are pushing green politics to the backburner while the EU gets framed as a green bully.

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Austria

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What’s the green wedge?

A carbon tax hitting drivers.

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The attack line: “This is the price that the conservative-green ‘government gluers’ are making citizens pay for their eco-communist redistribution regime” — Freedom Party leader Herbert Kickl, referencing the climate activists gluing themselves to roads.

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Belgium

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What’s the green wedge?

Polluting company cars.

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A quarter of full-time Belgian employees have a company car, making up about 10 percent of the Belgian car fleet. The large majority of these vehicles are fossil-fuel-powered — and most employees get unlimited fuel cards. Vroom vroom…

Despite pushback from pro-business, the Greens in government have begun reforming the company car scheme. Their changes will phase out tax deductions for fossil fuel cars by 2028, replaced in 2026 by a full deduction for zero-emission cars.

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Bulgaria

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What’s the green wedge?

The EU is withholding billions meant to help Bulgaria transition to green energy.

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Bulgaria’s cash is stalled over Brussels’ demands for more details about how the country is going to spend €1.3 billion of EU cash to help its workers, notably coal miners, switch to greener jobs.

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Croatia

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What’s the green wedge?

Marine conservation.

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Cyprus

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What’s the green wedge?

An EU push to cut shipping emissions.

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For instance, when Brussels put a price on maritime shipping’s carbon emissions, officials crafted a carve-out for passenger ferries linking the island to Greece.

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Czech Republic

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What’s the green wedge?

EU legislation to curb car emissions.

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That means new EU laws to abolish fossil fuel-powered cars and crack down on non-CO2 emissions threaten thousands of jobs.

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The opposition says the current governing coalition is being duplicitous about its stance. After all, it was under the Czech EU presidency that EU capitals agreed to end combustion engine car sales in 2035, and the Czech government ended up voting for the law last spring.

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Denmark

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What’s the green wedge?

An upcoming CO2 tax on agriculture emissions.

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But a much-delayed proposal for a carbon tax, expected to be released by an expert panel in February and debated by politicians this year, threatens to be a massive political pain for Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s left-right coalition.

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Estonia

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What’s the green wedge?

Car taxes.

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The government in January approved a plan to tax cars and raise the price on vehicles with higher emissions starting in 2025.

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Finland

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What’s the green wedge?

The EU’s forest protection efforts.

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The EU’s nature law is “a sad example of the acceleration of the EU’s dictatorial policy under the guise of climate change” — Foreign Trade Minister Ville Tavio at the nationalist Finns Party’s congress last August.

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France

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What’s the green wedge?

Reducing farmers’ diesel tax break.

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The government had planned to phase out a diesel tax break for the sector by 2030. But farmers want the change delayed as they struggle with the consequences of the war in Ukraine, inflation and natural disasters like flooding and droughts.

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Germany

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What’s the green wedge?

The Greens — and everything they touch.

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But as their influence has grown, so has the backlash against them. Environmental measures the Greens championed have also been targeted — including cutting farm fuel tax breaks, a clean heating law, speed limits, and the end of coal power.

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Even as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) soared to record popularity in the polls, the center-right Christian Democrats identified the Greens as their “main opponent.” The winner remains the AfD, which is on course to win three regional elections in former East Germany this year.

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Greece

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What’s the green wedge?

Climate disasters — and their fallout.

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Pasok leader Nikos Androulakis recently warned the government not to use climate change as an “alibi” and to step up its preparedness.

The attack line: “Why did you leave the country defenseless against natural disasters?” — Syriza’s parliamentary leader Sokratis Famellos to Mitsotakis during a debate.

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Hungary

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What’s the green wedge?

Chinese battery factories.

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Residents took to the streets in the town of Mikepércs to protest a $7.8 billion Chinese battery plant that would be Europe’s largest — a startling development in an area typically loyal to Orbán’s right-wing Fidesz party. Locals worry the factory will create pollution and deplete water supplies while providing few jobs, as foreign workers are expected to make up many of the staff.

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Ireland

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What’s the green wedge?

A mooted cow cull.

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The government in Dublin wants the agriculture sector to slash a quarter of its emissions by 2030 — and one of the proposals on the table since last year is a “voluntary reduction scheme” where farmers would be offered incentives to cull methane-spewing cattle.

In May, the Irish Independent obtained a government document that suggested such a plan would mean killing 200,000 animals over three years.

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The attack line: “Killing some cows doesn’t matter for climate change.” — Elon Musk, of all people, who tweeted about the story and launched it into the internet troll echo-chamber.

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Italy

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What’s the green wedge?

The death of combustion-engine cars.

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Last year, Italy tried (and failed) to kill EU legislation to ban the sale fossil-fuel-powered cars by 2035

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The attack line: Electric cars “get you fired in Italy and help China.” — Matteo Salvini.

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Latvia

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What’s the green wedge?

Wind farm NIMBYs.

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Lithuania

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What’s the green wedge?

Raising fuel taxes.

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The green tax package includes a €304.1-per-metric ton tax on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), which was previously untaxed and is widely used on farms and in rural areas.

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The tax is “punishing people who live more in the countryside.” — Union of Democrats “For Lithuania” MP Laima Nagienė in November.

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Luxembourg

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What’s the green wedge?

Carbon taxes — again.

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Because the tax applies to fossil fuel products like petrol, diesel or gas for heating, it targets both residents and those who commute across the border to Luxembourg for work. So everyone, basically.

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The (Pirate) party wants to replace the carbon tax with a “climate bonus” that rewards people for lowering their CO2 emissions.

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Malta

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What’s the green wedge?

EU plans to slash aviation emissions.

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The incumbent Labour and the opposition Nationalist parties have both spoken out against Brussels’ plans to tax aviation fuel and are generally skeptical of green policies that could harm the Maltese economy.

The Maltese government has also resisted a push from other EU countries to crack down on flight emissions from private jets.

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Netherlands

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What’s the green wedge?

Cutting farmers’ nitrogen pollution to align with EU law.

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After the government said it would shut down 3,000 highly polluting farms, the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB), a new right-wing populist farmers’ party, stormed to first place in regional elections last March.

Then in the national elections last November, rural voters helped vault the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) into first on the back of the party’s promise to ease nitrogen restrictions and end “peasant hatred.”

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Poland

What’s the green wedge?

Coal. And how to end it.

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Portugal

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What’s the green wedge?

Taxing older vehicles.

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More than 400,000 people signed a petition — the largest ever hosted by the Petição Pública website — calling for the policy to be dropped. And it swiftly was, with the chastened Socialists retreating.

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Romania

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What’s the green wedge?

A solar panel rollout.

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Slovakia

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What’s the green wedge?

Bears (and Brussels).

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Slovenia

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What’s the green wedge?

Cleaner heating.

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Spain

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What’s the green wedge?

Water wars

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Sweden

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What’s the green wedge?

Green development on Sámi territory.

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The town of Kiruna, where the government mining company LKAB says it has located Europe’s biggest deposit of rare earth metals, has become a symbol of the ways the green transition threatens Indigenous people’s ancestral lifestyles and customs.

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U.K.

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What’s the green wedge?

Green investment spending and the size of the state. READ MORE

Related articles

Will Europe's Farmer Protests Make Their Way To The U.S.? (AgWeb)

Excerpt from AgWeb:

From Berlin and Paris to Brussels and Bucharest, European farmers have driven their tractors to the streets in protest in recent weeks. In Germany, an estimated 30,000 protestors and thousands of tractors brought Berlin’s city centre “to a standstill” in mid-January due to dissatisfaction with the government over the cutting of agricultural fuel subsidies. The protests in France erupted over plans to reduce agricultural fuel subsidies and the government’s push to halve pesticide use by the end of this decade.

The situation escalated to a point where farmers sprayed manure on a local government building in the city of Dijon. In Paris, hundreds of tractors blocked off major roads into the country’s capital in what was called the “siege of Paris” by many media outlets—one of which being BBC News.

By mid-February, protests had spread to other European countries including Italy, Greece, Belgium, Poland, Spain and even Romania and Lithuania. There seems to be no sign of this fire going out any time soon. All the politicians can hope for is that springtime and Mother Nature will draw the farmers and their tractors back to their fields to sow their spring crops and allow the political firestorm to cool off.

But hope is not a strategy, and European farmers know it. Now the question may be how much of the “green gains” are EU’s leaders willing to concede in order to save their political hide. The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, now intends to scrap the plan to halve pesticide use. It also decided to exclude the agricultural sector from the strict timeline for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 90% before 2040. In Germany, farmers gained some concessions from the government on the issue of fuel subsidies but continue their demand for full reinstatement. On Feb. 1 in France, the main farmer unions called for an end to the protests after “securing promises of governmental assistance” on finance and regulatory issues. And in the EU’s home base, farmers “won their first concession from Brussels” after the commission proposed to delay rules for setting aside land for biodiversity.

Whether it is luck, strategy or irony on the part of the farmers, Europe’s reassessment of its climate policies comes as the bloc approaches EU parliamentary elections in June. The elections are expected to bring more far-right and fringe lawmakers into Parliament. Already, the continent’s political pundits are saying the next political cycle (2024-29) “will undoubtedly be less green to the point of putting into question the implementation of the green new deal.” Plus, the recent protests “are just a prelude of the further clashes to come.”

Too Many Sticks, Too Few Carrots
Will this fire jump the pond, and could we once again see tractors showing up on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.? Need I remind you, it is an election year here, too.

It is unfair and unwise to think farmers—no matter the continent where they live—are going to carry the costs of going green on their backs alone. At some point, all this needs to stop being an academic exercise and become an economic one. Start paying more to the farmer for carbon credits. Provide the tax incentives to finance the transition to “greener” farms. And stop with the rhetoric that burping cows are going to cause the next apocalypse.

Down on the farm in the U.S., the green agenda is at a crossroads. The question will be whether we will make the same mistakes Europe did and try to drive a green agenda too fast with a stick-heavy approach. The first litmus test may come sooner rather than later as Congress still has a new farm bill to pass. It is expected to be the “greenest” farm bill on record. This election year, given what’s happening in Europe, will our politicians pile on the carrots instead of giving us more sticks? Come November election time, we will see which road we are headed down. READ MORE

Related articles

Angry Farmers Are Reshaping Europe: Farm protests are changing not only Europe’s food system but also its politics, as the far right senses an opportunity. (New York Times)

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Bears, Cars and Angry Farmers Fuel Green Backlash

Here’s a country-by-country look at the “wedge” climate policies that are splitting European politics:

Austria

Belgium

Bulgaria

Croatia

Cyprus

Czech Republic

Denmark

Estonia

Finland

France

Germany

Greece

Hungary

Ireland

Italy

Latvia

Lithuania

Luxembourg

Malta

Netherlands

Poland

Portugal

Romania

Slovakia

Slovenia

Spain

Sweden

U.K.

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