European Climate Policy After the Elections: Implementation Challenges and the Next Phase

The European elections in June 2024 took place against a backdrop of multiple political crises: they were the first to be held since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the energy crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, all of which revealed Europe’s diverse economic dependencies. In the face of these crises and numerous other geopolitical challenges, it is hardly surprising that climate policy did not feature prominently in the run-up to the elections. In response to the radically changed political situation, Ursula von der Leyen therefore made competitiveness a key priority for the new European Commission – the second under her leadership. To what extent this will be accompanied by a weakening of climate policy ambitions is still an open question.

In this Global Governance Spotlight, Felix Schenuit identifies three fundamental challenges that decision-makers need to address: 1) Narrower majorities in the European Parliament and Council in favour of ambitious climate protection; 2) the crisis in European industry and the economy as a whole, which is creating new pressure to legitimise climate policy measures; 3) many unanswered questions in relation to so-called ‘difficult-to-avoid emissions’, which have hardly been addressed by climate policy to date.