BRUSSELS — A specter is haunting the European Union: The specter of the Green Deal. And Europe’s Socialists are running scared. 

Over the past year, an alliance has formed to exorcize this specter: Populists and conservatives, nationalists and farmers, French centrists and German liberals — all preaching to voters’ concerns that green policies will drive people to financial ruin without a safety net. 

Unable to get a word in? Europe’s chief champions of that safety net: the Socialists. 

It seems like a contradiction. At a time when many want more government aid to help them survive a changing world, the Socialists can’t gain ground. Not even half of Europeans think that a net-zero future will be affordable for all, yet the parties triumphing on those anxieties are mostly right-wing or centrist. Meanwhile, the European Greens and parts of the far left are capturing those seeking even greater climate ambition.

The reasons for the Socialists' inertia are myriad. 

Calling for a “just transition” — shorthand for protecting people’s livelihoods and rights while combating climate change — isn’t exactly a unique selling point. Most political groups now insist on leaving no one behind on the net-zero path. And the Socialists’ big tent means the group struggles to sharpen that broad message into radical proposals, which many fear could put off their aging voter base. 

The hesitation has been on display as the Socialists ramp up their campaigning for the European Union elections. 

The Socialists’ election manifesto is hazy on Green Deal details, and at the party’s pre-election congress last month, climate talk focused more on global warming than people’s pocketbooks.

That doesn’t mean they’re not trying. Their manifesto does vow to deliver “a Green Deal with a red heart.”

“Our role during the 21st century will be to make the green transformation compatible with the social dimension,” Spanish Socialist MEP Javi López said in an interview in his European Parliament office. “I really believe that.” 

Yet many observers and analysts, even those sympathetic to the social democratic cause, say the Socialists are struggling to project their vision of a welfare state fit for a warming world.

The polls bear it out. Socialists have been steadily losing ground since last fall to their conservative and far-right counterparts. 

“We have a program, but we don't have a guidebook to fight against the far right,” López acknowledged. “This is a reality.” 

Just transition fears

The Socialists’ stated goal is to inject the bloc’s climate strategy with more social policies, creating a “Green Social Deal.” 

There’s just one problem: It’s not clear what that’s supposed to be. 

At the Socialists’ pre-election congress in Rome, many high-level speakers, from Spain’s Pedro Sánchez to Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, barely mentioned climate policy. 

Those who did, like former EU Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans — now the leader of the Dutch socialists — made the social democratic case for more climate ambition by noting that allowing global warming to run amok will worsen inequality. 

“The first victims of not addressing the climate crisis will be the workers in our factories, the farmers on our land, the people in precarious situations all across Europe,” Timmermans said. 

But climate policies, if not carefully designed, can also exacerbate inequalities: For example, increasing fuel prices without making electric vehicles and public transport affordable can widen the gap between rich and poor. 

And it’s those fears that are winning out. The current anti-green backlash across Europe is being fueled by anxieties — easily exploited by the far right — that the energy transition will threaten jobs and make life more expensive. 

At a just transition conference organized by Belgium last month, Chris Bolesta, a Polish state secretary who served in the EU executive’s climate department until last month, called Europeans’ lack of confidence in a socially fair transition “frightening.”

“Farmers in the street, that’s proof that we do not get this right yet,” he said. 

‘Super generic’ manifesto 

The Socialists’ “Green Social Deal,” outlined in the election manifesto, has three key messages: leave no one behind yet remain ambitious on climate; invest in renewables and energy efficiency; and ensure affordable energy prices for all.

That doesn’t necessarily stand out these days — the current center-right-led Commission supports all those policies. 

“The question remains as to how socialists will distinguish themselves in campaigns,” Namita Kambli, who researches transition issues in the Brussels office of think tank E3G, said.

Pan-European manifestos tend to be vague, but the Socialists’ document is “super generic,” Karin Thalberg, a research fellow at the Jacques Delors Institute, a think tank named after the late French Socialist Commission president, said.

“I really didn’t find anything new. … It’s a very thin program," she said.

Thalberg thinks the green backlash has made the Socialists reluctant to fully integrate the Green Deal into their program. 

“Parties now are quite afraid to be very vocal about focusing on climate,” she said. “I think that’s why they’re so careful about tying the Green Deal to traditional social democratic priorities.” 

Predictably, Socialist politicians disagree. 

“In all our positions, you will always hear that we are very much focusing on policies that would leave no one and nowhere behind,” Maroš Šefčovič, a Slovak Socialist who took over Timmermans’ job as Green Deal commissioner last year, told POLITICO on the sidelines of the just transition conference. “And I think that's also well reflected in the manifesto.”

But the Socialists’ campaign is missing a broader narrative to counter the right’s green backlash, said Béla Galgóczi, a senior researcher at the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI). The scale of the transformation, he argued, requires a program that “takes away people’s fear of change.” 

Sourcing ideas

The issue isn’t necessarily a lack of ideas. Several Socialist MEPs, including Spain’s López, pointed to national party programs for more detailed ideas. 

The German Social Democrats’ program, for example, calls for labor laws to reflect climate risks like extreme heat. The European Socialists’ resolution from last year’s party congress in Málaga calls for “green social protection schemes” to protect people’s jobs and living conditions from green transition and climate change fallout. 

For Mohammed Chahim, the vice president of the Socialists’ group in the European Parliament, “the next term is all about green finance,” with joint EU funding matching the mammoth scale of the EU’s post-pandemic recovery efforts. Many Socialists also want to redirect more of the bloc’s funding to small farms rather than big agribusinesses.

Zeroing in on the social aspects of climate policy is “quite natural for us,” said Chahim. But he acknowledged that the “narrative has to be improved.”

One challenge is that the Socialists are a big-tent political family, where opinions and priorities can differ enormously from country to country. When it comes to voting on Green Deal laws, there are usually a handful of Socialists who vote against the party line.

“Not every social democrat understands that transition is significant enough,” Chahim said. “And then it's very easy to be tempted to go along with words like, ‘We have to slow down.’” 

There are other aspects stopping the Socialists from going all in on the European Green Deal, the ETUI’s Galgóczi argued. Many left-wing parties are reluctant to back policies perceived as unpopular among their dwindling industrial worker base, leaving them “stuck in the past.” 

Age is another factor. Social democratic voters skew older, López pointed out, and “they are less comfortable with the massive change” brought about by the green transition. 

The European Greens are more popular among younger voters, Galgóczi noted. And they’re also infusing their climate policy with themes of social and economic fairness, suggesting things like a “European climate ticket” to ensure affordable public transit and a “guarantee” that households will get adequate, affordable energy. 

But polling suggests the Greens will incur significant losses in June’s EU elections. The Socialists’ number of seats is also expected to shrink compared to 2019, but not by much, and partly due to their decision to kick out Slovak MEPs last year. 

Perhaps, Galgóczi suggested, Europe’s social democrats should look to Spain. Despite multiple challenges, Spain’s governing Socialists are among the few social democratic parties consistently polling above 30 percent. 

Under Socialist leadership, Spain has become a renewable energy leader and made significant strides toward phasing out coal. 

“We are mixing the social dimension with the green dimension,” López, a Catalan socialist, said. “We don’t have a Green Party in Spain, because we are the Green Party.” 

That doesn’t mean turning into the Greens, he added.

“The focus of our narrative is not green. In Spain, the first thing we say isn’t ‘green.’ We are doing a lot. But our main message is, we’re here to improve the living conditions of the social majority of this country," López said.

The challenge, López added, is how to sell voters a message of transformational change at a time when right-of-center parties are promising as little change as possible. 

“The model of welfare we had in the last decades, it has arrived at an end. Our model was cheap energy from Russia, cheap security from the U.S.A., cheap goods from China,” he argued. “The reality that your model of welfare is ending provokes a lot of anxiety — anxiety that is used by the far right.” 

Yet the Socialists are finding far-right methods — which López described as talking “about real problems but with fake solutions” — difficult to counter. 

Chahim, the Socialists’ vice president, argued that the European Socialists have the vision and the “real” solutions.

“But are we telling the story good enough?” he asked. “That’s a very, very good question.”