MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — For the Greens, it felt just like 2019.
After months of Brussels kowtowing to farmers over the Continent’s green future, the EU’s presidential hopefuls — including current European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen — were confronted by a debate audience of university students in Maastricht on Monday evening.
And the Greens’ lead candidate Bas Eickhout, a Dutchman, reveled in the adulation of what he told reporters in the pub afterwards felt like a home crowd.
“It’s because of you that Europe acted on the Green Deal,” said Eickhout, imploring the young audience to vote in June. Then he rounded on von der Leyen, accusing her of dumping her mission halfway through. “We are now at the crossroad of continuing the Green Deal or going back to a fossil standstill.”
For many younger people, climate change still looms large. Eickhout, who repeatedly received the loudest applause, won a poll taken in the room and online for the preferred next Commission boss. The students of the university shaped the debate, which was co-hosted by POLITICO, by choosing climate change as the opening topic.
Von der Leyen tried to convince the audience, many of whom will be voting for the first time in June’s election, that she is the real thing on climate change.
“Four years ago, I set the perspective with the climate law and climate neutrality by 2050,” she said. “It has to be implemented, so that it really happens on the ground.” But, like most of the candidates, she gave few concrete details on how she would make that happen, beyond sanctioning a capital markets union to drive private investment into Europe’s green infrastructure.
The occasion was a reminder to Europe’s center right of the cost of compromising on their green ambitions.
Eickhout’s attacks were focused on von der Leyen’s center-right European People’s Party, which has driven a series of green policy walkbacks in recent months. Most notably they rebelled against her landmark legislative proposal to restore 20 percent of the EU’s landmass and waters.
“When it comes to climate change it’s either a facade or they don’t even care,” said Maastricht University student Robert Keogh.
A recent European Council on Foreign Relations poll found that 18-29-year-olds were the only voting generation that prioritized climate change over Europe’s other challenges. In this election, Belgium and Germany will join Malta and Austria in lowering the voting age to 16. That could reinforce the traditionally climate-skewed youth vote — they have the most to lose from the worsening impacts of climate change.
But the mood in the auditorium was deceiving. The Greens are polling far worse than in 2019 and face losing the power to shape legislation if von der Leyen works with far right parties — a prospect she didn’t deny during the debate.
The motivation of young voters is also shifting. They are backing the far right in increasing numbers. And the multiple crises facing Europe have also diluted the focus of a generation that five years ago was unified around a cause.
“There’s been lots of things happening since then. So people have kind of forgotten about it, mostly because of COVID, inflation, cost of living,” said Keogh. “It’s depressing.”
The election of 2019 took place amid youth-led climate protests inspired by Greta Thunberg. It propelled their moral demand into the center of European policymaking and von der Leyen responded with the Green Deal, a suite of laws designed to scrub carbon emissions from every part of the EU economy and restore balance to the relationship with nature.
This year, young people have struggled to find their way in from the margins. Rather than street marches of tens of thousands, Thunberg has been taking part in smaller, more confrontational protests, blocking roads or coal developments — and often ending up in police custody.
Instead, their place on the barricades has been taken up by burning tractor tires and manure.
Turning to the audience, Eickhout said: “These elections matter and we need you again.”
Greens lionized by Europe’s young voters at EU presidential debate
Source: Viral Showbiz Pinay
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