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BRUSSELS — Ursula von der Leyen has just pulled off a delicate green balancing act.
The German politician secured a second term as European Commission president on Thursday with a political program carefully designed to woo both conservatives and environmentalists, who united to give her a comfortable victory.
Here’s how she did it: Smuggle green policies into her program, all framed as measures to boost the economy and security, and leave the inevitable fights for tomorrow.
“The fundamentals of the global economy are changing,” she said in a speech to the European Parliament ahead of the vote. “Those who stand still will fall behind. Those who are not competitive will be dependent. So the race is on, and I want Europe to switch gear.”
That competition, she writes in her program, “will dictate who will be the first to climate neutrality and first to develop the technologies that will shape the global economy for decades to come.”
Basically, she pulled a Joe Biden — taking inspiration from the U.S. president’s decision to disguise his signature climate law as an economic package dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act.
A strategy to slash industrial emissions? Call it the Clean Industrial Deal. Ditching fossil fuels? A measure to lower energy prices. A pact to protect oceans? More like a “blue economy” growth program. Adapting to a warmer world? Part of a security strategy.
It’s a noticeable shift from von der Leyen’s first-term program — which framed climate action less as an economic necessity and more as the right thing to do — and a reflection of Europe’s new political reality.
Last month’s election left the European Parliament more fragmented and more conservative than ever. The Green Deal has increasingly come under pressure as climate anxieties receded, overshadowed by security fears and cost-of-living concerns.
To secure reelection, von der Leyen faced the choice of seeking votes from either the populist right or the Greens.
On Thursday, she bet on the Greens — trying to promise enough climate action to them without scaring off her own center-right political family, the European People’s Party (EPP), which had campaigned for softer environmental regulations and greater support for industry and farms. The gamble worked.
“I am also very grateful to the Green group to have supported me,” von der Leyen told reporters after the vote. “We had extensive exchanges on all the topics and it’s a good sign that at the very end obviously, they were convinced to support me.”
But below Thursday’s unifying rhetoric lies a set of explosive proposals likely to shatter her centrist alliance — threatening von der Leyen’s ability to deliver on her green-ish promises.
Devilish details
Almost all green policies got an industrial makeover in von der Leyen’s second-term program.
Her big, headline-making climate pitch — a commitment to slash 90 percent of the European Union’s global warming contribution by 2040 — was framed as part of a so-called Clean Industrial Deal, which von der Leyen promised to announce in the first 100 days after taking office.
A proposal for a Circular Economy Act became more about securing the critical raw materials used in clean tech manufacturing than about how people sort their waste.
She also offered a plan to boost Europe’s climate-friendly tech manufacturing, such as heat pumps — a guaranteed crowd-pleaser for the entire room.
Cannily, von der Leyen offered scant details for many of these meaty promises, knowing that would only open up fierce political battles.
There was a fuzzy pledge to lower energy prices by “moving further away from fossil fuels” — a sentiment that most parties support. But what she means in practice — some groups want specific phaseout dates for coal, oil and gas, for instance — is unclear.
Then there was von der Leyen’s promise to “significantly increase our funding for a just transition,” meaning protections for those who lose out in a greener economy. That’s music to the Socialists’ ears, but offers no clarity on where that money would come from, with the EU on the cusp of a belt-tightening budget fight.
And following the tractor protests that raged across Europe this year, von der Leyen promised a “vision for agriculture and food” that would cement “ long-term competitiveness” — another unifying sentiment fraught with political tension the moment anything is proposed.
Similarly, she left many difficult questions unanswered in a plea to prepare for the droughts and floods climate change is unleashing across Europe: Who will get priority if water gets scarce? Who pays for cooling buildings? And should floodplains be restored to protect towns at the expense of farmland?
Schrödinger’s combustion engine
At the end of the day, though, it was the nebulous language that allowed all parties to claim victory — at least in the moment.
A perfect example was von der Leyen’s approach to a hotly debated EU ban on selling new combustion-engine cars in 2035. She simply stated the facts about where things stood on the ban, which has already been weakened, while still tossing in language for both sides to seize.
“The 2035 climate neutrality target for cars … will require a technology-neutral approach, in which e-fuels have a role to play through a targeted amendment of the regulation as part of the foreseen review,” her program reads.
That way, the EPP got backing for an e-fuels loophole the group wanted and the Greens celebrated von der Leyen’s commitment to banning “fossil-fuel combustion engines.”
Similarly, on controversial efforts to regulate chemicals, von der Leyen was evasive, promising only to “provide clarity” on a possible phaseout of so-called “forever chemicals” and to “simplify” the EU’s chemical safety regime — winking both to her own red tape-averse EPP and parties from the center to the left who’ve pushed for ambitious reform.
Not everyone was buying von der Leyen’s sphinx-like approach. The French Greens, for example, broke with their group to oppose von der Leyen, denouncing her for not detailing a “proactive pursuit of the Green Deal,” among other shortcomings.
Green NGOs were similarly skeptical. Von der Leyen’s offerings “show there is no going back on climate,” said Chiara Martinelli, director of the Climate Action Network Europe. “But it is too early to celebrate. We see a big risk of the competitiveness and deregulation agenda overshadowing ambitious climate action.”
But the Greens, the European Parliament’s foremost champions of the Green Deal, had arguably been so desperate to join von der Leyen’s centrist coalition to prevent the hard right from getting a foot in the door that they effectively signed a blank check.
“If you ask me, is Ursula von der Leyen a green candidate to be Commission president? Or is this a green program? … I can tell you: No,” said Greens co-leader Terry Reintke ahead of the confirmation vote on Thursday.
“We have negotiated hard, we have made compromises over these past weeks,” she continued. “And for me, what is crucial is that the majority that holds today is a majority of pro-European democratic groups in this house because we need to keep the far right from getting into power.”
Louise Guillot contributed reporting.
