On Tuesday, the European Commission announced that it will drop the planned ban on new internal-combustion-engine cars from 2035, after pressure from the German government and the auto industry. The announcement came only a few weeks after a vote in the EU Parliament weakening the bloc’s previous broad climate agenda. Pascale Piera, a member of the EU parliament (MEP) for France’s Rassemblement National had called that vote the beginning of “the dismantling of the Green Deal.”
This legislative blow against the legislative package — approved by the European Union in 2020 to deal with the ecological crisis — went relatively unnoticed by ordinary Europeans. This is quite normal, given the technical appearance of the regulation adopted and the haze of opacity that obscures most decisions in Brussels. However, last month’s vote marked a major setback for the EU’s green agenda, as well as the clearest sign yet that mainstream parties no longer have a cordon sanitaire against the far right. The single largest bloc in the EU Parliament, the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) negotiated the legislative changes with far-right parliamentary groups. Such forces, stretching from Spain’s Vox to Poland’s Konfederacja and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland had scored a record result in the 2024 European elections, securing one-quarter of seats and greatly increasing their influence.
The regulation approved in November was called the Omnibus Directive. Introduced by Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission, it is meant to “simplify” the obligations imposed on companies by the European Green Deal. The objective: to improve “European competitiveness and efficiency,” the founding mantra of the Union, which enshrines “competitiveness” as a fundamental principle in Article 3 of the EU Treaty. The Omnibus Directive cuts the environmental obligations of large private firms in two ways. First, it drastically reduces the scope of the…
Auteur: Pablo Castaño
