According to an article in Politico, big changes may be afoot in the relationship between the European Commission (EC) and the big NGOs that the EU monolith has long been funding. The EC “has told environmental NGOs that the money they receive from the EU’s green funds pot can no longer be used for advocacy and lobbying work”. If true, and if the extremely angry backlash from green organisations and their media pals doesn’t reverse the decision, this is big news. The EC has been extremely generous with public money over the years, and it would mean the loss of “€5.4 billion of funding between 2021 and 2027” to organisations such as WWF and Friends of the Earth, whose use of the cash, not only to lobby European and British politicians, has advanced their agendas throughout the public sphere.
Politico’s framing of this putative divorce between Big Green and the EU is that it reflects the “anti-green campaign promises from the centre-Right European People’s Party [EPP] during the EU election”. This would seem to mark the EPP as a climate sceptic group, but that would be very far from the truth. The EPP has long been the dominant group in European politics, and politicians from its fold, such as former European Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard, and the current EC president, Ursula von der Leyen, have been nothing but so-called ‘climate champions’. However, the EPP has never been able to win a majority of seats, and so has formed a grand coalition with the Socialists and Democrats (S&D). But even this coalition began to fracture in the 2019 European elections, in which the combined seats won by the partners was insufficient to form a majority. European Greens have not been part of any coalition agreement, and despite claims and perceptions to the contrary, rarely perform well in elections. The better explanation for the divorce therefore appears to be that radical environmentalism, as has been advanced by green NGOs, has at long last been identified as a liability.
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