Faustine Bas-Defossez handles issues related to nature, health and the environment at the European Environmental Bureau, a federation of nearly 200 NGOs. During the last term of the European Parliament, she witnessed the efforts of industrial lobbies to weaken the European Green Deal.
Since the last 2019 European elections, have industrial lobbies been more active than usual?
Yes, their activity has been intense because they have sensed the importance of the moment. The Green Deal is an ambitious, systemic project designed to put the European Union on the required path to carbon neutrality by 2050. And it requires action across all sectors. With the emergence of Covid-19, certain lobbies, such as Business Europe, which brings together many industrialists, tried to torpedo the whole agreement by claiming that the priority would now be to support businesses for years to come. This failed, and the crisis has instead contributed to greening economies with the various recovery plans.
Many companies were in fact on this line, as they know the economic risks posed by long-term climate and environmental problems. A second, more aggressive offensive against the Green Deal followed the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022, once again defending the idea that the urgency lay elsewhere, then unraveling after the agricultural crisis and in view of the forthcoming European elections from June 6 to 9.
On which texts did lobbying seem to be most effective?
The climate component of the Green Deal, the "Fit for 55," passed without too much trouble. The momentum of the 2019 elections, which took place in the midst of major youth climate marches, and the background of Ursula von der Leyen [president of the European Commission] supported this issue. Later, when it came to sectoral measures or specific issues, things got more complicated, with progress sometimes nipped in the bud.
The revision of the Reach regulation [the risk assessment of chemical substances] was not even presented after intense lobbying by the German chemical industry. The same goes for the framework law on sustainable food systems, which would also have benefited farmers, particularly on the question of prices. On plastic packaging, on the global strategy "From farm to table," on the nature restoration text, the lobbies deployed themselves by getting in touch with MPs from the far right, the European People's Party [EPP, center and right] and other groups. The closer we got to the next elections, the more important other events became, and the more the lobbies' arguments in favor of maintaining the status quo spread within the Commission and Parliament.
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