Confronting Backlash Against Europe’s Green Transition

Pushback against the European Green Deal and the continent’s wider climate action has been gathering momentum across Europe. This trend has attracted political and media attention as one of the most significant current developments in the European Union. The EU has recently diluted various elements of its climate change policies, including through a February 2025 omnibus law that rolled back various sustainability-related requirements for businesses.¹ The EU has been a frontrunner in the green transition, so this pushback against climate action—what has been termed greenlash—is of particular importance.

But the extent and nature of Europe’s greenlash remain hard to pin down with precision. Some of it flows from genuinely grassroots, citizen concerns about the energy transition, while some is driven in a more top-down manner by political parties and leaders with their own sets of interests. The current greenlash is rooted in the far right but is a more extensive phenomenon present across the political spectrum, and its combination of top-down and bottom-up dynamics echoes those described in another piece in this series by Jasmin Logg-Scarvell. We explore how climate activists are responding with upgraded strategies and tactics that may yet help protect and reform the EU Green Deal. With the future of EU climate policy hanging in the balance and the world careening toward critical tipping points for climate mitigation, those who wish to advance climate action must find ways to address the multifaceted drivers of the European greenlash movement.

Bottom-Up Versus Top-Down Greenlash

There are both bottom-up and top-down strands to European greenlash, and the relationship between these twin dynamics is shifting in politically significant ways. Grassroots mobilizations against Green Deal policies have spread across Europe over the past several years, and they often go hand in hand with an opposition led by elite figures in politics, industry, and the media. While political and corporate actors have harnessed the sentiment to push their own agendas, bottom-up greenlash is also real and needs to be examined. 

Farmers’ protests have been the most high-profile element of greenlash. Images of farmers driving tractors through capital cities have dominated headlines, with participants demanding the rollback of environmental protection regulations that they argue threaten their livelihoods. Farmers are the most prominent and unified group mobilizing against the Green Deal, and they tend to cite concerns not only about the energy transition’s affordability but also more broadly about globalism and elitism. Many are angry about cheap imports, rising production costs, and falling prices for food sales—problems they see as exacerbated by Green Deal policies.² Farmers also object to what they view as the closed and unaccountable nature of EU-level policymaking embodied by the Green Deal. They have not only called for the reversal of environmental policies, such as emissions regulations, but also demanded policies to address their broader grievances about the rising cost of living and the lax trading rules on imports, calling for protectionist strategies that sit uneasily with the kind of global coordination necessary to tackle climate change.³

Farmers’ protests have won significant policy shifts from the EU, in part because they have framed their grievances in terms of very tangible and immediate crisis imperatives. Large agri-businesses and farmers also benefit from a relatively privileged position in EU decisionmaking; their protests have achieved tangible policy changes to address their grievances, to the detriment of ambitious climate action.⁴ In the Netherlands, for instance, farmers’ protests morphed into the Farmer–Citizen Movement, a right-wing political party that ultimately scored electoral success as a direct result of bottom-up greenlash dynamics against the Dutch government’s approach to implementing the EU’s nitrogen directive.⁵

Beyond the public attention given to the farmers’ protests, grassroots dynamics have nourished greenlash across European society more generally. The targets of this wider, bottom-up greenlash have most commonly been the costs, fairness, intrusiveness, and ideological underpinnings of climate policies.⁶ The sentiment undergirding bottom-up greenlash is widespread and extends well beyond protesting farmers. It ranges from other demographics at the grassroots level to more institutionalized forms of resistance to climate action.

The targets of this wider, bottom-up greenlash have most commonly been the costs, fairness, intrusiveness, and ideological underpinnings of climate policies.

Some of the societal fear flows not from the climate agenda per se but more from the opaque nature of political decisionmaking. Polls show that many European citizens feel left out of the decisionmaking process and concerned that they have little chance to influence policies; notably, there is a correlation between climate skepticism and political disaffection.⁷ The Yellow Vests protests in France, for instance, grew out of opposition to raising carbon taxes on fuel and included a range of ordinary people from across the country, who took to the streets to protest the costs of living and French state policies more broadly. A 2025 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development concluded that citizen trust in the green transition is still lacking, with only a minority of citizens believing their governments will make progress on reducing carbon emissions. A few European governments (such as France, Portugal, and Spain) have initiated municipal-level, green participatory budgeting to address this.⁸

Recently, local activism has intensified against wind farms—for example in Spain and in Italy.⁹ There have been protests and attacks against solar farms, too, in the UK and Italy.¹⁰ In Poland, thousands demonstrated against the closure of coal power plants and argued that the EU’s green policies threatened their livelihoods; steel workers staged similar protests.¹¹ Protests against low emissions zones have spread from places like London and Oxford to cities all over Europe.¹² When Germany tried to require new heating systems to be more climate friendly in 2023, thousands took to the streets to march against what they called the Green Party’s “heating ideology,” resulting in the government diluting the law.¹³ And as European leaders promote critical minerals as a crucial part of the green transition, local community organizations and individuals in places like Portugal, Spain, and Serbia have begun mobilizing against these mining projects.¹⁴

Grassroots greenlash has increasingly fed directly into more institutionalized political movements. Coalitions between grassroots greenlash and political parties that organize against the European Green Deal and similar, national-level policies have strengthened, with climate-skeptic parties gaining traction at the polls across Europe. In France, for instance, public backlash led the National Assembly to vote to abolish low-emission zones, with critics arguing that the measure put a disproportionate burden on those who cannot afford low-polluting vehicles. Reinforcing local community greenlash dynamics, right-wing political actors campaigned on this controversy, framing such ecological protections as anti–working class.¹⁵

Indeed, the nexus between the civic and political spheres tends now to function more effectively on the anti-climate than the pro-climate side of EU policy debates. Environmental activists lament that fissures between the grassroots pro-climate movement and green parties are deepening. In the June 2024 EU elections, the tally of green parties’ seats dropped from 71 to 53, while more climate-skeptic parties made gains across the board.¹⁶ As green parties have made uncomfortable compromises over the years, a gap has widened between pro-environment political leaders and their environmentalist base; in contrast, among climate skeptics, such unity has tightened.¹⁷

The Far Right and Beyond

Much greenlash is tightly entwined with the continent’s far-right surge. Indeed, greenlash and the far right have become mutually reinforcing, each playing a major role in driving the other. European far-right parties have now incorporated opposition to climate policies as a key tenet of their political platforms. Right-wing populist leaders across Europe, such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France, have increasingly stressed their opposition to climate policies, alongside their traditional nativist ethnonationalism.¹⁸ In the February 2025 German elections, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) made great play of the need to resist what it termed the country’s emerging “eco-dictatorship.”¹⁹ And the presidential candidate from Poland’s Law and Justice party, Karol Nawrocki, won in June 2025 after promising to call a referendum on the Green Deal.²⁰ These political parties tend to fuse opposition to the Green Deal with their wider illiberalism and euroscepticism.

However, the focus on the far right’s relationship with greenlash should not detract attention away from the elements of greenlash that come from other actors, such as corporations and centrist parties. The far right is only one actor mobilizing against Europe’s green transition.

Businesses across Europe have been advocating for the overhaul of environmental laws that they frame as burdensome and inefficient. This narrative is part of a broader trend in the EU, away from a focus on green transition priorities and toward a focus on economic competitiveness and security, particularly as the international order corrodes. Corporate lobbying groups have spearheaded campaigns against legal protections aimed at a wide variety of environmental and social issues, in favor of competitiveness for European business.²¹

Furthermore, the links are tightening between far-right institutes and the fossil fuel industry. This trend is part of what has become an increasingly multilevel European greenlash, in which different levels of action entwine with each other. In the past several years, shadowy networks have taken shape among far-right actors, online communities, populist parties, right-wing news media, and corporate actors. These networks have gained considerable influence and have become a powerful axis of the connection between bottom-up and top-down greenlash dynamics.²²

Some of the trends extend to more mainstream parts of the political spectrum. The center-right European People’s Party has dramatically pivoted from climate pioneer to prominent Green Deal critic. Center-right and even some centrist European politicians are now rowing in the same direction as major polluting corporations and far-right parties, even if they have not yet deepened or formalized their cooperation.²³ Center-right leaders are still hesitant to work with the far right fully, but as they too turn on the Green Deal, they have formed loose cooperative arrangements on some environmental issues.²⁴ This shift is coming to shape EU policies, with the European Commission adopting two omnibus packages slashing corporate due diligence and reporting requirements aimed at environmental and human rights protections.²⁵ The greenlash is driving a reconfiguration of EU-level political alliances and prizing apart the decades-long, mainstream pro-European coalition.

Greenlash is driving a reconfiguration of EU-level political alliances and prizing apart the decades-long, mainstream pro-European coalition.

An especially sinister dimension of greenlash is also on the rise. As both a driver and a consequence of multifaceted greenlash, governments’ criminalization of environmental activists has appeared as the most alarming and aggressive form of resistance to climate action. As Oscar Berglund argues in his piece in this series,²⁶ this phenomenon has emerged in Europe out of a discourse that vilifies climate activists. Powerful actors in political institutions, the media, and elsewhere have normalized such a discourse. In this sense, greenlash is contributing to a crackdown on civic freedoms across Europe, even under so-called mainstream governments. Serious instances have occurred in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK, among other states—showing that this shocking turn goes well beyond the far right, even if right-wing civic organizations have been prominent in peddling the line that climate activists are terrorists.²⁷

Climate Activism’s Response

While the political tides seem to be turning against the Green Deal, grassroots climate activists are responding to the greenlash and revising their tactics. Despite the apparent momentum of attacks on green policies and the environmental movement in Europe, there is still a strong push for climate action across the continent. Greenlash has pushed many environmental activists to rethink their tactics.

Many are trying to bridge divides and build the kind of broad coalition necessary to facilitate a socially just green transition. They are focusing far more on the concerns related to the economic costs of the climate transition and democratic decisionmaking. Activists have focused on network-building and cultivating a positive vision of climate action, through initiatives like Absurd Intelligence and Speak Up, which showcase speakers and connect cultural and artistic movement leaders.²⁸ Much activism is responding to greenlash concerns, even if a strong enough coalition to reenergize the Green Deal has not yet emerged in a formal way.

European citizens have continued to mobilize for climate action as greenlash has gained ground. The successes of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Fridays for Future mobilizations were more immediately visible in 2019 with the launch of the Green Deal, but XR has continued to grow and develop new chapters around the continent in recent years. It has organized more frequent protests, including in Brussels, explicitly targeting EU inaction and its rightward turn.²⁹ When the German government cracked down on Last Generation, the group formed a follow-up project, New Generation, which broadened its mandate beyond the climate crisis to also include fighting “the alliance of the right and the rich.”³⁰

The phenomenon of radical tactics such as climatage, a portmanteau of climate and sabotage explored by Noah Gordon in this series, has received much attention across Europe but still comprises only a small portion of the overall movement.³¹ The A22 Network, for example, includes prominent climate activism organizations across Europe, many of which have engaged in both formal tactics like petitioning as well as more disruptive or even climatage-type tactics. Since its inception in 2022, the network has expanded from earlier members, such as Ultima Generazione in Italy and Emergency Break in Denmark, to also include groups founded just last year, such as Folk Mot Fossilmakta in Norway and Ostatnie Pokolenie in Poland. Other groups, such as Shut the System, are increasingly engaging in acts of sabotage against corporations they see as responsible for the climate crisis, as government regulation fails to restrict polluters and at times instead targets peacefully demonstrating activists.³² Mainstream media tends to paint climatage and other disruptive protests in an unfavorable light, but public support for more ambitious policy to combat the climate crisis has, if anything, grown in Europe.³³

Recognizing that a key political vulnerability of the Green Deal lies in the argument that it is too expensive, pro-climate civil society and political leaders have focused on the strategic redistribution of costs as one possible route to mitigate greenlash. In Spain, for instance, the government managed to close twenty-eight coal mines without suffering electorally, because it agreed to financially support the affected areas.³⁴ Such redistribution represents a promising area for potential coalition-building between grassroots pro-climate groups and political actors.

Greenlash has also highlighted divisions among climate activists in Europe.

However, greenlash has also highlighted divisions among climate activists in Europe. Activists are divided on how to bridge concerns about the economy with concerns about climate change. While some seek a middle way that emphasizes the economic benefits of the green transition, others advance a more radical view that transformative system change is needed. As activism gathers force, high-profile splits and controversies have pushed groups like XR to reconsider their tactics to limit the public discontent they caused.³⁵ The group Just Stop Oil, having achieved its original goal of stopping government oil and gas extraction from the North Sea, earlier this year announced its move to disband and cease disruptive tactics like throwing soup at art.³⁶ These trends reflect divisions between those drawn to more radical approaches like climatage and those advocating for less controversial tactics and broader alliances behind climate action.

Greenlash has helped reinvigorate calls to make the Green Deal more democratic. While many climate activists have demanded that decisionmakers “listen to the science,” others view this as an undemocratic kind of technocratic ecocentrism that elevates scientific actors above others in the environmental decisionmaking process.³⁷ Criticism against both the privileged position of science in climate action and the technocratic, top-down, and bureaucratic nature of EU decisionmaking has pushed activists to advocate for participatory democracy mechanisms. Climate assemblies have been an especially prominent method to counter resistance and feature citizens’ voices on climate issues, with varying degrees of success. A new coalition of EU civil society organizations formed in 2025 to push for more systemic citizen participation to upgrade the democratic quality of the Green Deal.³⁸ This is a significant shift in activist strategy as the mass-protest, NGO, and citizen-assembly routes show some signs of coming together in efforts to counter greenlash.³⁹

Conclusion

The European Green Deal hangs in the balance, and it is now more viscerally debated in EU institutions, national legislatures, and civil society than at any point since its inception. Commissioners and members of the European Parliament are split over whether to water down green mandates. Still, greenlash is not all-dominant: A new phase of climate activism entails more determination and resilience and is employing new strategies to defend EU climate action.

EU policymakers interested in pro-climate policies need to be alert to the multifaceted nature of Europe’s greenlash and the need for a similarly multipronged response to it. While some greenlash comes from top-down elite interests, the depth of genuine concern among citizens should not be underestimated. Policymakers should take care not to reduce greenlash to a problem of the far right, as this framing simply adds fuel to popular frustration with current EU policymaking.

Formal EU climate policies are not yet fully harnessing the growing, bottom-up momentum behind climate action. Pro-climate activists can take lessons from the impact of climate-skeptical mobilizations in recent times. Those advocating for climate action need to fashion an activism that recasts the Green Deal as a broad, collective social project as opposed to an elite, scientific agenda. If they can frame the Green Deal as geopolitically and economically favorable, it will be more broadly accepted. Pro-climate activism and advocacy will help produce stronger climate policy if its leaders focus more on the thorny challenge of how to fairly distribute the costs of the green transition. As attention to climate justice grows alongside greenlash, more people are calling for an approach to climate action that links planetary health with tangible improvements to everyday life. The need to reshape climate policy in this more democratic fashion is the defining task of the times.⁴⁰

In this series of articles, Carnegie scholars and contributors are analyzing varieties of climate activism from around the world, focusing on the intensification of activity both from the protesters themselves and from the authorities and forces who are the objects of their discontent.

Read more from the series here:

• Why Climate Sabotage Remains an Unlikely Strategy
• The Growing Criminalization of Climate and Environmental Protests
• In Iraq and Yemen, Climate Activism Requires Both Defiance and Adaptation
• Women and Climate Activism in Morocco and Tunisia