EPP pitches itself as farmers’ party ahead of 2024 European election

The center-right European People’s Party is pitching itself as the defender of farmers and rural interests ahead of next year’s European election, doubling down on its disapproval of EU green policies.

The conservative group, the largest in the European Parliament, has been campaigning against two key Green Deal proposals: new rules on pesticides and nature restoration that they say threaten the EU’s long-term food security.

The Sustainable Use of Pesticides Regulation aims to slash chemical pesticides use and risk by half by 2030, while the Nature Restoration Regulation calls for the EU to restore at least 20 percent of the bloc’s degraded areas by the end of the decade and all sites in need of restoration by 2050. The Commission’s objective is for both proposals to become law before the 2024 European election.

The EPP argues that these goals are too steep and will put an unfair burden on farmers at a time when they’ve been asked to boost food production amid Russia’s unlawful war on Ukraine, previously a major agricultural exporter to the bloc.

The party on Friday is expected to adopt a resolution, obtained by POLITICO, that again "rejects" the Commission’s proposals and calls for them to be scrapped altogether. That sets it up for a fight with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is also an EPP member and has staked her legacy on making Europe go climate neutral.

Populism

The conservative party has been fighting the Commission president’s green ambitions since late last year, including by publishing misleading statements on social media warning of higher food prices and “even a global famine.”

It also claimed the nature restoration proposal will lead to countries having to “tear down villages built 100 years ago” to restore wetlands. When asked for examples of where this might happen, a press officer for the EPP group said they could “not refer to any particular villages, nominally.”

In negotiations on the proposals, the EPP is pushing to scale back the scope and ambition of the new laws. It argues that nature restoration measures should only be mandatory within protected Natura 2000 areas, in order not to impede on agricultural land.

The EPP has also found allies in the Parliament’s Euroskeptic European Conservatives and Reformists, and the far-right Identity & Democracy. In April, all three groups proposed several amendments calling for the pesticide reduction law and the nature restoration legislation to be struck down.

NGOs have voiced their displeasure at the EPP’s tactics, accusing members of "scaremongering" and acting in "extreme bath faith."

“There is a mountain of scientific evidence showing that the threat to our ability to produce food in Europe, and globally, is overwhelmingly coming from climate change and the collapse of biodiversity,” said Ariel Brunner, regional director of the NGO BirdLife Europe.

The EPP is trying to "weaken" the legislation to ensure it "almost becomes meaningless," said Sabien Leemans, senior biodiversity policy officer at WWF Europe, suggesting that the party is turning to "populist rhetoric" as part of its "pre-election campaign mode."

The EPP isn’t the only party putting up roadblocks to the contentious Green Deal targets.

The liberal Renew Europe group is split over the nature restoration legislation too, with roughly half of its members arguing that the targets should be scaled back while the other half wants them increased. The liberals, as well as the Socialists & Democrats, are also grappling with internal divisions on whether the draft pesticides law is too ambitious or not ambitious enough.