A few puny heads of lettuce are still lying around, otherwise the food boxes are empty. That’s the future for the people of the European Union if Green ideas continue to spread – at least that’s what a recent tweet from the European People’s Party (EPP) is trying to convey. The EPP will block a law in the European Parliament that aims to halve the use of pesticides in Europe, the text on the lettuce reads: “The green proposal will reduce food production in Europe.”
However, the law was not proposed by the Greens at all. It is part of the ambitious climate and nature conservation program of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. And she is a member of the CDU, so also of the EPP.
The EPP obviously needs a few contortions, if not white lies, should it, as expected, go into the European election campaign with the top candidate von der Leyen in June next year. So far, it has actually stood for the green transformation of Europe. But the enemy image of the CDU and CSU is green, in Germany and now also in Brussels.
The “European Farmers’ Deal” sounds like a counterpart to the “Green Deal”
A year before the election, the EPP, led by CSU politician Manfred Weber, committed itself entirely to agriculture. A resolution called the “European Farmers’ Deal” was recently adopted at a meeting in Munich. It sounds like a counterpart to the Commission President’s “Green Deal”. The EPP wants to be perceived as the protecting power of agriculture and therefore rejects the pesticides law as well as a law for the “restoration of nature”, which is intended to advance the renaturation of areas that are already protected.
The green agricultural expert Martin Häusling is outraged. As a member of the European Parliament, he hasn’t seen it since 2009 that a parliamentary group wants to completely refuse to work on a law, he says. Now Ursula von der Leyen has to fight for it. But that’s unlikely. Rather, there are increasing signs that the EPP and von der Leyen are closing ranks.
The President of the Commission still leaves open whether she is aiming for a second term and is running as the top candidate for the EPP. But hardly anyone in Brussels doubts that anymore. The EPP is considering moving the nomination party conference from January to March 2024. As head of the EU executive, von der Leyen should remain unmolested by party bickering for as long as possible. Agricultural reforms are not at the top of her agenda, and she will hardly seek conflict with the EPP, on the contrary. Papers are now circulating to show that the EPP has supported virtually all of von der Leyen’s environmental and climate legislation since 2019.
Resistance from everywhere against a sharp reduction in pesticides
In purely mathematical terms, the pesticide issue is linked to climate policy. The fewer pesticides used, the lower the CO₂ emissions in agriculture. If the law does not pass, the EU will not be able to achieve its climate goals. The EPP is also committed to reducing the use of pesticides. But from a political point of view, the regulation is now seen as an example of over-regulation in Brussels.
Like the law on renaturation, it formally falls within the competence of Frans Timmermans, a social democrat who, as von der Leyen’s deputy, is responsible for environmental and climate policy. Timmermans must be responsible for the fact that the bills contained technical errors. Initially, there were calls for the use of chemical fertilizers to be largely banned in landscape protection areas. For agriculture in Germany, where large areas of protected areas have been designated, that would be a disaster. The Green Minister of Agriculture, Cem Özdemir, also protested. The passage has now been corrected, but the law has few friends.
The EPP is not alone. Social Democrats and Liberals have also announced resistance, and even French President Emmanuel Macron is now demanding that the EU should not enact new laws in environmental and climate policy, but rather enforce the existing ones. The federal government is one of the few in the EU that is still looking for a compromise on the law, says Martin Häusling. But the interest in further regulating agriculture will probably also decrease among the Greens as the day of the European elections approaches. You have other worries.
The Hau-den-Habeck, to which the Union has committed itself in Germany, is now also being taken up by European politicians. This is exemplified by a paper that Norbert Lins and Peter Liese (both CDU) wrote as leading agricultural and climate politicians of the EPP with a view to the European elections. It defends “farmers, foresters and villagers” against alleged green impositions. The arc ranges from Robert Habeck’s heating law to EU regulations on air pollution control and the use of pesticides to regulations that protect wolves but would harm sheep and cattle farmers. Allegedly privileged green urban milieus in Berlin, Cologne, Stuttgart and Tübingen are explicitly mentioned, in which such laws would be popular at the expense of rural areas.
So the election campaign becomes a culture war, and it remains to be clarified what role Ursula von der Leyen could play in it. According to a Forsa survey, 40 percent of Germans are in favor of von der Leyen’s second term, but 46 are against it.