Five years ago, hundreds of thousands of students walked out of their schools in a coordinated global “strike” to demand climate action — and turned the 2019 EU election into a triumph for the Greens.
This month’s vote was different.
Green parties crashed, losing more than a quarter of the seats they’d won in the European Parliament five years earlier. The victorious right now claims a mandate to roll back green initiatives and slow efforts to cut pollution, even though climate change remains a widely held concern in the EU.
“This time, I think some politicians felt more freedom to fully attack the climate agenda,” the Greens’ lead candidate, Bas Eickhout, said. Without the moral urgency of young people on the pavements and in the news, global warming was simply “less prominent” in the campaign, he added.
