The European Parliament and Fridays for Future: analysing reactions to a new environmental movement by Europe’s climate policy champion

ABSTRACT

The Fridays for Future movement has shaped public debates on climate policy all over Europe and beyond in recent years. It demands politicians to take action and fulfil the promises of the Paris Agreement. This article turns to the European Union and asks how the European Parliament met this movement. In doing so, we reflect potential tensions between its reputation as an environmental policy champion and the most direct link to the European demos on the one side and its composition of various political groups on the other side. Indeed, our analysis shows most political groups in the Parliament, even conservatives and liberals, support the movement. This is somewhat surprising given their general stances on environmental and climate policy. To explain the broad support given to Fridays for Future, we turn to the inner-parliamentary dynamics and the overall status of the Parliament in the supranational political system.

KEYWORDS:

• European Parliament
• Fridays for future
• environmental policy
• climate policy
• political groups
• environmental movements
• climate movements

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We follow Mudde (2007) in his terminology characterising populist radical right parties.

2. As national backgrounds or election proximity might still incite MEPs to deviate from the group’s stance (Hix and Høyland 2022; Hobolt and Spoon 2012; Koop, Reh, and Bressanelli 2018), we will, nevertheless, pay attention to different responses within the EP’s political groups.

3. Nowadays, the platform is called X.

4. Fridays for Future, Greta Thunberg, and climate movement were used as keywords (respectively hashtags when Twitter was searched) to identify relevant sources.

5. Founder and most prominent figure of FfF.

6. To ensure accuracy, we coded the observations a second time after two weeks. Since we used this approach and coding scheme before, the second round of analysis only led to re-classification in five observations.

7. For instance, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) was a member of this group until it joined the ID group in 2019. We cannot go into detail of each groups’ member parties but will discuss their overall ideological position in the following sections.

8. In the current EP, MEPs from the Movimento Cinque Stelle are not aligned to any group.