The Budapest-based think tank Climate Policy Institute has recently published an analysis of the 2024 European Parliamentary elections. As they point out in their findings, green parties have suffered significant losses compared to their results from five years ago.
For example, the Greens in Germany only got 11.9 per cent this year, as opposed to the 20.5 per cent they got in 2019. Overall, the ruling ‘Traffic Light’ coalition in the country, which evidently includes the Greens, faced a severe rejection from the voters. SPD, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party only came in third with 13.94 per cent of the popular vote, behind the centre-right CDU and the far-right AfD. Similarly in Austria, the Green Party only got 11 per cent of the vote. In the Scandinavian countries, where governments had the strictest environmentalist regulations enacted, green parties have also underperformed, the report states.
The Green political group ended up losing 19 seats in the European Parliament in 2024, while the left-wing progressive Renew Europe lost 22 seats.
The authors of the report believe this was due to the popular rejection of the European Green Deal, which was adopted by the European Commission, along with the ‘Fit for 55’ action plan, adopted in the summer of 2021. The 55 in the title refers to the EU’s goal to cut greenhouse emissions by at least 55 per cent by 2030. The overall goal of the European Green New Deal is to make Europe the world’s first climate-neutral bloc by 2050.
However, according to the authors, the European bureaucrats have put most of the burden of these goals onto the general populace. On the other hand, centre-right, and even centre-left socialist parties have favoured a way of transitioning to new energy that hurts the general population to a lesser degree.
‘As apparent, the people of Europe have sent a warning to politicians. Across Europe, voters have turned to parties that are not willing to sacrifice their current economic prosperity to achieve the forced and costly net zero emissions fast track.
Changes in the security preferences of EU citizens are also a major factor in the decline of the Greens. There is a trend for voters to increasingly favour parties that are more effective in addressing the security challenges they face,’ the analysis concludes.
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