Europe Letter: The green deal’s next test is the Spanish election

The vote on the Nature Restoration Law in the European Parliament will not be the last challenge to the European Union’s green deal. The next major test will come as Spain holds a general election on July 23rd.

Polls indicate incumbent Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez is lagging behind his conservative challenger Alberto Núñez Feijóo. If the pattern of a string of regional and municipal elections recurs Spain’s next government may be led by his People’s Party, supported by the far-right Vox.

This new government would take over the EU presidency, which Spain holds until December, putting the right-wing government in a powerful position over EU legislation for a key final stretch before work is suspended ahead of elections next year.

Leading negotiations, with the power to set the priorities and pace at which EU laws progress, the next Spanish government may determine whether there is a rush to complete outstanding green deal files on pesticides, building insulation, carbon emissions and cars, or whether to ”go slow” until time runs out.

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In its campaign manifesto the People’s Party has pledged to “rationalise” the objectives of the EU’s green deal – a set of policies aimed at making Europe climate-neutral by 2050 – and slow down the timetable for implementing it along with the EU’s Farm to Fork sustainable agriculture plan.

The election programme of Vox, meanwhile, advocates for Spain to withdraw from the Paris climate accord and “the immediate suspension and review of the entire European green deal”.

The implications of such positions would depend on how much power Vox is able to secure over the government.

In any case Feijóo would be expected to heed the call of his political party’s pan-European group, the European People’s Party (EPP) of Fine Gael, for a “regulatory moratorium” on all new green legislation.

“We want a regulatory pause,” an EPP statement said after its national leaders met last month.

The statement said the EPP could not support proposals for the sustainable use of pesticides or the Nature Restoration Law despite these being core planks of the EU green deal legislation spearheaded by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, an EPP member herself.

The EPP’s leader in the European Parliament, Bavarian politician Manfred Weber, has led the drive to halt the progress of the green deal, starting with the Nature Restoration Law.

There is history there: Weber was denied the position of commission president in favour of von der Leyen after the last European elections in 2019 – and Sánchez was one of the national leaders who opposed him.

Amid pressure from Weber, Sánchez delayed until September a scheduled speech in the parliament – meaning the key speech to set out the Spanish presidency’s priorities may be delivered by his successor instead.

Spain’s election is a vital one for the EPP, which fears losing its dominant clout in Europe.

The EPP’s CDU left power in Germany with the departure of Angela Merkel, and its member parties have dwindled to become minority players in Italy and France, weakening its claim to top EU jobs such as the commission presidency when these are reshuffled following the elections next June.

In Dutch provincial elections in March a new farmers’ party surged to become the largest force in the senate following a backlash against government plans to reduce livestock to cut nitrogen emissions. This experience put the fear of god into Europe’s centre-right parties that they will lose votes to upstart rivals if they appear to be ”too green”.

In southern Spain the dwindling water supplies of a nature reserve illustrate the consequences of targeting environmental protections as a political strategy.

Doñana National Park is considered one of Europe’s most important wetlands, a last refuge of the endangered Iberian lynx and stopping point for 500,000 migratory birds on their route between Europe and Africa. With the support of Vox, Feijóo’s People’s Party in the regional parliament of Andalucía has pushed forward a bill that would expand the permitted extraction of the reserve’s groundwater by farmers to irrigate their neighbouring strawberry crops.

When the European Commission warned Madrid it could face fines if the plan went ahead – the European Court of Justice found Spain broke EU environmental laws by allowing excessive groundwater extraction in 2021 – Weber stepped in to accuse the environment commissioner of “campaigning” for Sánchez.

Meanwhile, time is not on nature’s side. As a drought grinds on the wildlife of Doñana find less and less water to drink: in September the last permanent freshwater lagoon in the Unesco-protected biosphere dried up.