Greens try to flip the script: Blame conservatives, not the Green Deal

LYON, France — We have met the enemy, and he is not us.

That was the defiant battle cry in southern France over the weekend, where Europe’s green politicians had gathered under a cloud of fury seemingly directed at them.

Farmers have taken to the streets in recent weeks to protest EU environmental regulations and cross-border competition while demanding better wages — issues that could easily be lumped under the Green Deal umbrella, a slate of climate-friendly policies that literally bear the European Green Party’s name.

But at the party’s congress in Lyon, where delegates were plotting how to avoid expected losses in this June’s EU election, green politicians repeatedly insisted it was their conservative and far-right opponents, not them, that had left farmers in dire straits. They even made their case directly to farmers, who were invited to air grievances at a hastily scheduled session Friday night. 

“What we want is to stop being dependent on subsidies,” implored Joris Michon, a pear grower who heads the local chapter of Coordination Rurale, France’s second-largest farmers’ union. 

We want, he added, “a decent living from our work with fair prices, perhaps with the introduction of market regulation and a better sharing of margin profits.”

That’s what we want, the Greens replied throughout the weekend. We’re with you. 

It’s a hard sell given the images of recent days: Rumbling tractor conveys snarling roads and blocking ports; a statue toppled into a roasting bonfire; manure dumped at the government’s doorstep. And anger, everywhere anger, all seemingly directed at the Green Deal. 

But the Green Deal is not to blame, attendees argued. 

“The farmers are protesting decades of conservative farming policy … decades of conservative trade policy,” Leonore Gewessler, Austria’s environment and climate minister, told POLITICO at the congress. “Farmers have been the pawns shuffled around in the big chess board of agribusiness in Europe.”

She then drove the point home: “We need to show them that they’re picking the wrong enemy in the Green Deal.”

It’s a case being made amid a cacophony of green-bashing — but the stakes are existential for the Greens. 

The party surged to become the European Parliament’s fourth-largest group in 2019, but now stands to lose about a third of their seats after June’s election, polling shows. That could leave them sidelined as key decisions are made about how — or even if — the EU implements the entire Green Deal, which aims to make the EU climate-neutral by 2050. 

Dutch MEP Bas Eickhout, the Greens’ election co-lead, maintained the Greens provide the clarity farmers want | Olivier Chassignole/AFP via Getty Images

This is our fight, too

Green leaders say they are actually the ones fighting the farmers’ fight — and have been for years.

Just look at their European Parliament record and the roots of the green movement, argued German MEP Terry Reintke, who will co-lead the Greens’ EU election campaign. Fairer wages for farmers, compensation to implement environmental protections, shelter from global trade deals — all were top of the Greens’ agenda in the last four years, she said.

Yet green leaders were keenly aware in Lyon that they would need to be in listening mode on the campaign trail. Irish Environment Minister Eamon Ryan told POLITICO that coming to an alliance with farmers will only arrive through genuine attentiveness to their concerns — and a plausible pitch that climate-friendly policies will benefit the bottom line. 

“Farmers have the knowledge of the land” and should be trusted, Ryan said. But “we need our policies to be geared up toward regenerative agriculture” to steer them in the right direction.

Dutch MEP Bas Eickhout, the Greens’ other election co-lead, maintained the Greens provide the clarity farmers want. Other parties, he said, are fickle — supporting an environmental policy one day, reversing it the next. 

He blasted the French government as a perfect example — the Elysée recently suspended its plan to reduce pesticide use amid the protests after previously supporting it. 

“This is such an unpredictable behavior and this is the problem,” Eickhout said. “We Greens, we have a vision, we will stick to it.”

But a consistent vision can only get you so far. The Greens are expected to lose a significant number of their 72 European Parliament seats, and the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) — which has run a vituperative campaign against green legislation of late — will likely retain the top spot with room to spare.

But the EPP is also linked to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen — a leading Green Deal architect and pitchwoman who now finds herself somewhat estranged from her political family on climate issues just as she’s expected to mount a bid to remain the EU’s top executive.

“She will face a political party behind her that is going completely against her own legacy, against the things that she has achieved,” Reintke said.

That makes the Greens’ continued presence even more vital, Reintke argued.

“If there is a chance to continue the Green Deal,” she said, “it will only be if we will have strong Greens at the table who are going to push for it.”