Highly charged debate on, and mobilization for, climate action is coming to define European politics. Sharpened pressures in favor of and against environmental policies are driving a new vector of political polarization. The multiple farmers’ protests that have captured media headlines in recent weeks—in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and other countries—have brought festering concerns to the surface, and these are only one strand among many of growing popular unease. A gathering backlash against green policies, or greenlash, has fractured what appeared to be a broad consensus on the environmental agenda. It is widely agreed that this trend puts a heavy strain on democratic processes, adding another factor to the long-gestating crisis of European democracy.
While all this is undoubtedly worrying, the emerging politicization of climate issues is in many ways overdue and inevitable. The divides now on display over environmental issues foreground debates that EU institutions and European governments have avoided for too long but that need space to play themselves out. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the increasing politicization of climate change arguably represents a necessary step forward. This counterintuitive reading of Europe’s roiling protests might lead governments to build a more systematically inclusive democratic climate politics.
Democracy Under Strain
Recent events make abundantly clear that the politics of the green transition have become one of the defining challenges for European democracy. In the last half year, Europe has witnessed its largest marches pushing governments for more far-reaching climate action, for instance around the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference (COP28). At the same time, it has also seen a wave of protests pushing back against the requirements of the energy transition. Since early 2024, farmers’ protests against environmental rules, falling prices, and imports have commanded the most public attention. But there have been many other campaigns that exhibit similar concerns—against wind farms, low-emission traffic zones, requirements for households to change gas heaters, cuts in fuel subsidies, and other issues.
Political parties that express climate change skepticism have generally gained ground across Europe in the last year. Battle lines are becoming more viscerally drawn: in the space of a few weeks in fall 2023, the center right defeated the climate change–skeptic populist right in Poland, while in the Netherlands, the pendulum swung the other way. In some countries, new rural parties have appeared and surged past long-established green parties, with a focus on pushing back against encroaching environmental regulations. Most commentary now frames these trends as a crisis for democracy to the extent that they are fueling the far right’s surge ahead of the June 2024 European Parliament elections.
Climate change–skeptic protests and parties contain a range of different critical views. These extend from hard-core anti-environmentalism to a far more common anger that the energy transition is not being managed in a fair or transparent way. Farmers’ protests have won public support as they reflect a much broader popular unease with governments’ climate transition policies. These demonstrations fuse with rural constituencies’ especially marked declines in levels of satisfaction with democracy and the EU. The dynamics are eclectic: many citizens feel genuine concern about the costs and effects of the climate transition, while at the same time, far-right parties are clearly harnessing this concern for political agendas that have little to do with the environment.
While the most-commented worry is the intersection of climate change doubt and the far right, mainstream EU policy responses also raise uncomfortable democracy concerns. EU institutions and European governments have combined executive-heavy measures to push through climate policies, on the one hand, with sporadic concessions to farmers and other climate change–skeptic protesters, on the other hand. The result is a pinched and fitful democratic process when it comes to the climate change agenda.
It is instructive to stand back from the day-to-day turmoil and conceptualize how these climate change politics have impacted European democracy in a deep, structural sense. The trend has been toward what might be termed green trustee democracy, or eco-technocracy. European governments and EU institutions have in recent years favored relatively top-down measures to advance more ambitious climate action. Executives have taken numerous steps to remove climate commitments from the cut and thrust of democratic debate. This has involved empowering technical bodies and experts, streamlining emergency provisions that dilute checks and balances, and tightening the rules governing mass protests.
While most governments have offered increased funding to offset the costs of the climate transition, they have offered little public participation in such schemes. If anything, these schemes’ undercurrent is a hope that citizens can be bought off with money as a substitute for critical mobilization. The schemes provide compensatory funding for certain parts of the population but not an opportunity to set the terms of the debate about the climate transition. These mechanisms add another layer to the eco-technocracy trend as they not only sideline citizen participation but also expressly cut out national parliamentary controls. The 2022 U.S. Inflation Reduction Act is much more participative than any European funding scheme; projects under the act include a community benefits plan formulated with local citizen input.
European governments and the EU collectively have offered concessions to protesters, but these have been notably ad hoc and reactive, rather than the result of a well-structured process of democratic inclusion. Most governments have moved to dilute green rules that apply to farmers. The EU has removed requirements related to agriculture from its new target of reducing emissions by 90 percent by 2040 based on 1990 levels; the European Commission has offered farmers a new dialogue, but this appears to be a largely cosmetic and face-saving consultative exercise.
The EU’s Net-Zero Industry Act now being introduced further ramps up fast-track licensing for renewables projects. Civil society has increasingly criticized the opaque structures of the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility and its funding to support reforms and investments related to the climate transition. Governments now promise funds for “green jobs at home” in a strikingly mercantilist approach that sets different European countries against each other; this carries a tinge of populism wielded to defeat the populists.
While democracy stands rather battered and bruised in this latest phase of climate change politics, many environmental activists have also become frustrated with mainstream political processes—for the inverse reason of the greenlash protesters. These activists argue that traditional democratic channels are failing to generate sufficiently bold climate action. Many, who a few years ago warmly espoused the holding of climate assemblies and the like, now favor more radical direct action. A major change in the last two years is that divisions have widened appreciably between different strands of environmental activism. Even if the importance of the climate crisis might justify extralegal action, many governments have taken advantage of disruptive tactics to place tighter conditions on protest activity and other civil society actions. Democracy finds itself assailed from both ends of the climate change spectrum.
A Silver Lining?
In sum, for multiple reasons, democracy and the climate change agenda appear to have become more mutually detrimental. The rise of climate change–skeptical parties ahead of the 2024 European Parliament elections and the surge of anti-green protests would appear to be both resolutely bad news for the climate change agenda and a grave indictment on European democracy. Yet, in some ways, these recent developments might be interpreted as a necessary improvement in the terms of political debate. While such a suggestion will, of course, seem bizarrely counterintuitive against the current backdrop, it flows out of a deeper and more structural consideration of the climate-democracy nexus that looks beyond the daily coverage of political drama.
There is no easy way to take contentious politics out of the climate transition. For those who want to make quick and far-reaching progress on climate action, democratic processes might increasingly seem like an infuriating and unhelpful distraction. The current turbulence and mounting greenlash make it even more tempting for policymakers to favor elite-oriented managerial democracy and for activists to prefer direct action outside the channels of democratic processes. However, attempts to short-circuit the difficult politics of the climate transition are likely to prove counterproductive in the long term. While the eco-technocracy reflex is understandable and has helped keep some momentum going for climate policies, it risks intensifying the very dynamics that drive Europe’s current unrest.
The potential silver lining to today’s turmoil is that the wave of protests might suffice to break the dam of such constricted politics. The deepening of political debate about climate action makes life more difficult for policymakers, but it begins to face up to issues that have to be addressed. The question of who pays for the energy transition was not prominent on the agenda a year ago; today it is omnipresent. And it needs to be. The divisions and protests over such issues represent democracy in action, not a deviation from it. Yet, by overly conflating greenlash with the rise of the far right as something to be defeated or suppressed, governments self-servingly imply that the current tumult is an anomalous distortion to democracy.
The deepening divisions now on display suggest that climate change debates need to be inverted: they need to move from seeing political revolt as an inconvenience to harnessing democratic renewal as a useful tool for mobilization. The crucial question is how democracy can be appropriately deepened for the era of the climate transition, not selectively contained. Even if many might suggest that this is self-evident and well-known in principle, the climate and democracy communities have not gelled well together in practice. The climate community can often see democracy as secondary or contingent in importance, while the democracy community has probably underplayed the specific and unique impacts of the climate crisis on political dynamics.
Climate experts tend to have a somewhat instrumental view of democracy, as they focus on the question of whether certain aspects of democratic processes help or hinder climate action. It could be more useful for them to aim their strategies more widely at the overall state of democratic quality. The underlying cause of today’s revolts is not just climate policy as such, but rather the fact that standard channels of representative democracy are not working well. This accentuates citizens’ feeling of disempowerment, and this, in turn, drives the greenlash protests and anger so widely on display now across Europe.
Climate change is the issue that disgruntled citizens may lock onto, but their concerns are deeper and more politically systemic. Current policy responses offering concessions that simply delay the energy transition for governments’ own political interests need to give way to measures genuinely designed to address the transition’s social consequences. It is clear that governments need to respond to the concerns of farmers and others, but not in the kind of panicky, reactive, and ad hoc way they have done so far. Instead, they should do so through a transparent and open process of policy cocreation.
More open pluralism may give a voice to climate change skeptics; but over time, differences need to be argued out to generate long-term social legitimacy. This is not the same thing as expecting a smooth consensus, nor does it amount to a strategy of sidelining or defeating skeptics and concerned voices. And it is not about simply better explaining or communicating the need for climate action, thinking that this can pull climate concerns back from being a divisive issue. Rather, it is about recognizing that community empowerment can help generate ideas and solutions that neither experts nor hard-core activists are likely to devise. Democracy’s advantage is that it can mobilize the whole of society toward certain aims by allowing plurality to unfold.
The lesson from Europe’s current wave of unrest and anger is that more two-way interaction between climate action and democracy is crucial—and overdue. It is just as important to ensure that the climate emergency deepens democracy as it is to deepen democracy in a way that unlocks the climate transition. This is because the transition needs a new social contract, not just emissions targets and state aid for so-called green jobs. Governments will achieve little by throwing out the morsels of a few knee-jerk concessions, and the EU cannot only regulate or spend its way to a successful climate transition.
Such a green social contract can be generated only through comprehensive and multilevel democratic renewal. Contrary to what many climate experts and activists insist, the aim should not be to quash, limit, or circumvent contestation over climate issues or to engineer institutional routes that favor certain climate policy outcomes. The need is for a more inclusive political process that mitigates the dilemmas of collective action: the underlying problem for democracy is that the costs of the climate transition feel direct and personal, whereas the benefits of a good transition are diffuse, impersonal, and abstract.
As they look to tackle the current tumult, governments and EU institutions should design ways to broaden the framing of the climate crisis. There will be no one institutional pathway or innovation capable of dealing with the politics of the energy transition. Only by reworking the positive connections between different democratic arenas can a fully systemic transformation begin. For this to happen successfully, the communities affected by climate action need to have the main role in setting agendas and bringing forward plans—in a way that has not happened to date and on which even climate activists have not focused as they prioritize big-picture emissions targets. Governments’ current responses to protests and climate change polarization is almost the inverse: trying to keep the current system contained while offsetting the costs of the transition to some citizens.
Trustee democracy and more radical direct action both have a part to play, but they need to serve a wider process of democratic renewal. Many have come to advocate climate assemblies as the crucial innovation needed; these are indeed vital but should not be overhyped as the only way of dealing with the politics of the transition. Direct democracy will also be part of the picture. New initiatives will be needed in parliaments and parties to help counter disinformation in climate debates. Socioeconomic actors need a central role, as political transformation will need to move hand in hand with that of economic systems. Governments and EU institutions also need to formalize a way of giving a voice to future generations.
This renewal needs to be separated from any particular party ideology or point on the political spectrum. Perhaps most challengingly, it needs a narrative that resonates not only with liberal progressives but also with conservatives—maybe based on climate policies being a way of protecting traditional communities. This calls for more all-inclusive and open national conventions to underpin a future green democracy.
Conclusion
Underneath the dramatic protests and political battles that are now unsettling European politics lurks a deeper challenge: the intersection between climate change and democracy is becoming more complex and more consequential. Sharper debate over climate action is set to become a defining feature of the future of European democracy; conversely, the shape of democracy will do much to condition the energy transition. The EU needs to come out of the current unrest with a different approach to the politics of climate change. With governments flitting between top-down haste on climate action and reflexive backtracking after each protest, a more constant and co-shaping democratic process is needed on climate issues.
The forbidding sense of doom that increasingly darkens European politics is well justified. And yet, the widespread framing of this crisis is perhaps too one-sided. The dramatic and unnerving politicization of climate change debates has opened important and necessary discussions that formal climate policies have for too long neglected. Up to now, climate change negotiations have progressed in a relatively technocratic way, with technical experts holding sway and relatively little scope for direct citizen participation. Today’s wave of protests provides a healthy reminder that the problematic politics of the green transition cannot be short-circuited indefinitely.
Over the longer term, broader citizen engagement will be needed to create legitimacy behind a new green social contract. Climate policymakers and activists would benefit from a wider political lens. More open pluralism might create inconvenience but can help address the root causes of rising resistance to climate action. The climate crisis should be a catalyst for deep democratic transformation; while it fails to generate this, today’s European malaise will make climate neutrality harder to achieve and serve only as a prologue to far deeper unrest in the future.
Carnegie Europe is grateful to the Open Society Foundations for their support of this work.
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