Green European Journal

The EU has placed competitiveness, industrial renewal, and strategic autonomy at the centre of its agenda. But will these ambitions support the green and social transition, or become a pretext for deregulation and a weakening of Social Europe? The General Director of the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), Andrew Watt, explains what this changing political landscape could mean for workers and trade unions and social policy – and for the kind of economic model Europe is building.

Seden Anlar: Competitiveness, strategic autonomy, industrial policy and deregulation are rising up the EU’s political agenda, while the bloc is also navigating war, energy shocks, trade tensions, competition with China, and growing uncertainty around the United States. Where do you see Europe within these overlapping pressures, and what kind of transformation are they driving within the EU?

Andrew Watt: Europe is changing because the world is changing. There are longer-term trends driving that change, like demography, decarbonisation, technology, and now AI. Then there are shorter-term developments: war, the dislocation of the global political system, the behaviour of powers like Russia, but also our erstwhile ally, the United States, and renewed inflationary shocks.

For populations, policymakers and trade unions, most of these changes are initially perceived as threats. They constrain our fiscal resources, for instance. We spent a lot of public money getting out of the Covid crisis and dealing with the inflation crisis. That reduces the size of the cake available today, for example for social policy.

Then there is the demand from the US and from many Europeans for a more autonomous European defence policy, and that is going to cost money. We also have the burdens associated with ageing. So if you take the fiscal situation as a focal point for all these things, you can see how pressure is building in the system. We are going to have to face up to some trade-offs and make some difficult decisions.

But I don’t think it is all negative. Some of the responses we are seeing – industrial policy, a more critical attitude towards trade, a greater role for governments and perhaps, hopefully, for the European Union itself – are things that some of us have wanted for a long time.

There is that old story about Europe progressing through crises. It is often only when crises come that the political space opens up to take steps we think are anyway necessary .

How is this broader transformation affecting Europe’s economic model? Are we moving towards a genuinely different model of EU economic governance, or are older political-economic cycles returning in new language?

We have seen some considerable changes, and we are seeing pressure for further change. The open question is whether it is going to be enough.

If we understand economic governance as both what the EU itself can and cannot do in economic policy, including through the EU budget, and the framework within which national governments conduct economic policy, then there have been important changes. We had NextGenerationEU and the Recovery and Resilience Facility, which was a substantial investment package. It broke new ground in terms of European-level borrowing, with money distributed to member states to enable them to invest when they otherwise would not have been able to, and the debt being paid back at the European level.

This was actually a big deal, but it was temporary. What we need is something like that, or even something more ambitious, on a permanent basis, and there is considerable resistance to that. We just about managed to get political support for NextGenerationEU on the understanding, in some capitals – I won’t mention any by name – that it had to be temporary. Making something like that permanent is really a sort of Rubicon. There are some decisive member states – all member states are important, of course, but some are more important than others – where there is resistance. I would hope that we take that step, but whether we do or not remains to be seen. The fact that the market for US government bonds has come under considerable pressure could, and I believe should, serve as a window of opportunity here.

We have also seen changes to the national fiscal rules. They have been revised in a good direction, but still not enough. The decisive thing we still do not have is the ability for governments to invest and to borrow in order to invest without coming up against legal constraints.

There is now an opening for more spending, but it is for defence spending. Defence may also be necessary, but we do not have that same opening for other forms of investment, and the multipliers from defence spending are much lower than for civilian public investment projects.

When you say Europe needs more investment, what kind of investment are you talking about? What is holding it back, and how could Europe unlock it?

The first distinction is the most basic one, between public investment and private investment. Public investment is much smaller, but it is important because, if it is done intelligently, it can drive private investment. We are no longer in the bad old days after the euro crisis when public investment was very depressed. Things have improved slightly, but still not enough to really move the dial.

Business investment is much bigger, so we also have to think about what gives the private sector an incentive to invest. The message we are getting is that there is a heavy regulatory burden and, if we cast that off, companies will invest. I don’t think that is going to happen.

What is holding back investment in the short term? Energy prices are a huge problem. The breakdown of trading relations is another. We also have a genuine competitiveness issue, which is with China.

But what I think is less well discussed is the internal situation, particularly internal demand. Investment that expands productive capacity will only happen if entrepreneurs are convinced there will be demand for the additional products. Europe’s population is now hardly growing at all and is set to shrink, so that is another structural factor holding companies back from investing. We are unfortunately getting locked into a pessimistic, self-reinforcing cycle. That is why the public sector can sometimes kick-start a more virtuous circle and get us out of a vicious one; public investment “crowds in” private investment.

Another factor is regulatory uncertainty. Look at the constant debates in the automobile sector about whether, from 2035, petrol and diesel engines are going to be allowed or not – backwards and forwards. That sort of uncertainty is killing investment.

Other issues include the way investment is financed in Europe and the lack of a venture-capital market. So it is not a simple matter where you pull one lever and suddenly get investment.

What is holding back investment in the short term? Energy prices are a huge problem. The breakdown of trading relations is another. We also have a genuine competitiveness issue, which is with China.

We need to do several things. We need a bigger role for the public sector at the national level, and major European initiatives on the green transition, technology, and infrastructure. We also need investment in schools, hospitals and care services, in addition to classical infrastructure, grids, and interconnections between countries. In technology, we need to build up our own indigenous tech sectors. That is where we really need investment.

We also need more regulatory certainty and, in some cases, support for companies. If European industries need protection from aggressive Chinese competition based on excessive subsidisation, then I would support that. I am not a China basher, but we do need to protect our industries where those distortions exist. And this is where I think we need to see the different orders of magnitude. The whole political system, the media, and the Brussels bubble are investing so much time and energy in the deregulation agenda, which is of more marginal importance.

Even if regulatory simplification is successful on its own terms, I don’t really think anybody believes – and I certainly don’t believe – that it is going to deliver the scale of investment Europe needs. It might reduce some costs, but it is not going to move the dial.

The main point of the Draghi report was that we need around 750-800 billion euros a year in additional investment. Even if we got half of that, it would make a big difference if it were done effectively, in the right places, and in the right sectors. How is regulatory simplification going to deliver that investment? I don’t think it will.

The EU’s growing focus on competitiveness, strategic autonomy, and security is arguably putting its social agenda at risk. Do you see these agendas as compatible? And is it still realistic to think of Social Europe as a structuring political project in this new context?

There are certainly political forces using the competitiveness argument to make Europe less social and to weaken it. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

Let me say a few words about competitiveness. If you use the word in a businesslike sense, Europe is competitive. We have had a current-account surplus for many years. We have no problem paying our way in the world. So this chain of thought that goes, “Europe is not competitive, therefore we have to cut pensions, cut childcare allowances, or make people work longer hours” just doesn’t fly from a very basic point of view.

The more useful understanding of competitiveness – the one Draghi and that most sensible economists use – is really about productivity. We should not get obsessed with the idea that a country is like a company, because it isn’t. Competitiveness is about productivity, living standards, and what we can afford as societies. If we don’t have productivity growth, the cake is not growing. And if the cake is not growing, we will have distributional conflicts that are very difficult to resolve.

I very much believe the labour movement and trade unions need to play a role in the debate about how to raise productivity, and many of them do. We have evidence in our research that when you involve workers in decision-making – through works councils, at board level, through collective bargaining, or at sectoral and national level – you get better outcomes. It is not hard to understand why. If you involve people in processes of structural change, for example restructuring or the green transition, the outcomes will be better. There will be less resistance and less conflict, and productivity can grow faster. That is one example of how a sensible competitiveness or productivity agenda goes hand in hand with good social policy.

There are numerous other examples. Think about childcare, education, and healthcare. It is perhaps an instrumental way to think about these things, but from an economic perspective they also affect how productive workers are, how often they can go to work, how much work they miss because they are ill, and how productive they are when they are working.

One of the main ways the competitiveness agenda is manifesting in this mandate is through the simplification-deregulation agenda. What risks do you see this creating for Social Europe, workers’ rights, and labour protections? And how should trade unions respond?

I think we can have a debate about simplification in some cases, but deregulation should be out of the question. That is essentially also the line the trade unions take. We have sectoral bodies and interprofessional bodies where business and labour are represented and can work through the issues that make regulation unnecessarily complex. European Parliament committees can do that as well. That is all fine.

What concerns the trade unions, and us at the ETUI, is the speed with which these things are now being pushed through. There can be over-regulation, or cases where the same thing is covered by two different directives. Nobody wants things to be more complicated than they have to be. But we need to understand that regulation was put there for a purpose.

We can have a debate about simplification in some cases, but deregulation should be out of the question. That is essentially also the line the trade unions take.

It could be that that purpose no longer exists. For instance, we do not need a regulation for steam trains if we no longer have steam trains. Some regulations simply become obsolete. But usually the public purpose is still there, whether it is health and safety, or protecting the environment, workers, or pregnant women. So if you want to weaken or remove a regulation, you need to answer the question: what about that public purpose? How is it still going to be achieved?

Unfortunately, I don’t think we are really having that detailed debate at the moment. It would have to be a very granular, detailed, and time-consuming debate, and instead these things are being pushed through the institutions very quickly. It also makes no sense to talk about regulation simply in quantitative terms. Business lobbies champion ideas like “one in, one out”: every time you introduce one regulation, you have to throw out an old one. That is absurd.

The question should be: what public priorities do we want that the market will not provide without regulation? And then, of course, we can discuss how we achieve those objectives without imposing unnecessarily high costs.

Europe is again talking about strategic industries and reindustrialisation – areas in which trade unions historically played an important role, both in industrial development and in shaping workers’ rights. At a time when collective-bargaining coverage has declined considerably, what might this renewed industrial agenda mean for trade unions and their capacity for renewal and mobilisation?

Following the Covid-19 pandemic and the energy shocks and highly politicised trade relations of recent years, we are simply in a different world. In this context, the renewed focus on industry is welcome, but we should not take it too far because most European workers are in services. That said, industry still has an outsized economic importance. It matters for exports, it is often where productivity growth is generated, and a lot of service employment is built around the industrial sector. It also has strategic significance, including in relation to defence.

For trade unions, industry matters because it is a big part of their history and, in many countries, where they remain relatively strong. Large workplaces are easier to organise than many fragmented service-sector workplaces, and practices of industrial relations have developed over decades – even centuries to some extent – in which trade unions have a recognised voice at the table. You have national and European works councils as well as board-level representation. Union density tends to be higher than in services, although the public sector is of course now extremely important for the trade-union movement as well.

The unions want to play a role in this new industrial-policy debate, and we as a research institute want to support that. This is also closely linked to trade and China. I said before that Europe does not really have a classical competitiveness problem except vis-à-vis China. We have a very large trade deficit with China – roughly one billion euros a day, or around 360 billion euros in 2025. Germany, for instance, had trade surpluses with China for many years but now also runs deficits.

That is partly linked to Chinese policies which, in my view, need to change. China needs to import more and address over-subsidisation in some industries, such as the car industry. It needs to pay its workers more or revalue the currency. There are lots of different steps it could take, and Europe should be negotiating with China about them. But I do not want to bash China. China is also very important for the green transition. I am fine with cheap solar panels coming in and, to some extent, cheaper cars. But we also need a chance to export. That is what trade is for: countries import things others are good at producing and export things they themselves are good at producing, and everybody benefits. But China deliberately restricts imports.

We have been losing manufacturing employment. We lost around 220,000 manufacturing jobs between the average of 2024 and 2025. That is a lot, and that can’t continue.

At the same time, we do not want Fortress Europe. We do not want to stop the green technologies we need from coming in. What has changed is the naïve faith that was dominant in Brussels for decades that we simply need free trade, and everything will be fine. That is gone, and that also creates opportunities for trade unions.

Unions are worried about forced labour, deforestation and the oppression of organised labour in some of our trading partners. They want to use trade as a lever to improve conditions in other countries. That has become more possible, and I think that is an important development.

There has long been a wider debate about the limits of GDP as a measure of economic and social progress, including whether it adequately captures dimensions such as wellbeing, care, and ecological sustainability. Given your point about how the economic “cake” is distributed, how should we think about growth and productivity in an era of extreme wealth concentration and weak redistribution?

Let me split that into two things and first focus on the beyond-GDP question.

We have a long tradition at the institute of work on just transition, and I intend to continue that. Growth is not the solution to everything. What we need, I think, is qualitative growth and investment-driven growth, because that is also a path to decarbonisation. It is easy to become depressed about the climate crisis, but if we have a hope, I do think technology is an important part of it. Technology comes through scientific processes and research, but it only changes economic outcomes if it is actually invested in and becomes part of the capital stock of the economy.

So I am not a “go-for-growth” person in a traditional sense. But I am also very clear that I am not in the degrowth camp. Whether we like it or not, if the cake is not growing, distributional conflicts build up. Politics becomes poisonous: it is you against me; either you have it or I do. If we want decent pensions and we want to take care of elderly people with a shrinking labour force, we need productivity growth and some economic growth.

But the distribution question is absolutely central. Think about comparisons between the United States and European countries. Even if GDP per capita in the United States is higher, people work longer hours and have shorter holidays, and income is much more unequally distributed. So, the benefit for the average person – or, more precisely, the median citizen or median worker – can look very different. How GDP is distributed is therefore absolutely vital.

Whether we like it or not, if the cake is not growing, distributional conflicts build up. Politics becomes poisonous: it is you against me; either you have it or I do.

We are seeing rising concentrations of wealth and income within the corporate sector, more in the US than Europe, but increasingly here too. That is not only an economic problem; it is a political problem. People with enormous amounts of money have outsized political influence. Europe has stricter rules around party financing than the United States, but wealthy people still have influence. They buy newspaper publishers, for example.

Digital services and technology also tend towards monopoly, and wherever you have a monopoly you tend to get concentrations of wealth. That is bad socially, but it can also be bad economically.

And that brings us to AI. If AI improves productivity and those gains are distributed through the economy, then it can be a very good thing. We become more productive, living standards rise, and maybe some boring tasks that people do not like doing can be done by AI. If the gains are shared, people have higher wages and use that income to buy other services, and you can maintain full employment. That is more or less how the positive scenario works.

But that won’t happen if the gains from AI become concentrated among a handful of billionaires or trillionaires, some tech workers, and shareholders. In that case, aggregate demand breaks down, you do not get the corresponding expansion in other services, and you can expect unemployment and social strife.

There is also a more specific labour-market issue beginning to emerge. It looks as if AI may be hitting entry-level jobs – not only in coding, but office positions, skilled jobs, and some professional occupations. Some studies point to this outcome, and there is evidence that fears around AI are quite concentrated among people who are just starting their careers. At the same time, those who already know the ropes may benefit from AI. They can use it to become more productive and perhaps increase their earnings.

So, once again, the question is about distribution: who benefits from the technology and who carries the costs?

Earlier you touched on the challenges posed by Europe’s changing demographics. While ageing societies and shrinking workforces are usually framed as a crisis, tighter labour markets could actually also give workers greater bargaining power, perhaps even strengthen collective bargaining. How do you see those two sides playing out, both now and in the future?

There is a joke going around about a young person who goes to a job interview. At the end, instead of the employer saying, “We’ll call you,” the candidate says: “I’ll put you on my shortlist.” It is a joke, but for certain sectors and skills there is something to it. People can afford to be a bit more choosy. For teachers and healthcare workers, for example, large cohorts are leaving, and employers need people. The same applies to some parts of industry.

This can be good for job quality as well. Even in countries we think of as having high standards, there are sectors – notably care – where working conditions are pretty bad: low pay, long hours, and physically demanding work. We are already seeing that employers who want to keep people in these sectors or attract new workers have to pay higher wages and offer more flexible arrangements, including working hours that make it easier for people with caring responsibilities to remain in the labour market. So, tighter labour markets can also bring positive changes.

We are still relatively early in this EU mandate, and political agendas are likely to evolve over the coming years. Looking ahead to the next few years, what do you think is likely to happen? What would success for Social Europe look like from the ETUI’s perspective? What concerns you most, and where do you see reasons for optimism?

We have to get through some short-term issues first, and they are going to be decisive. If geopolitical conflicts drag on or relations between the major powers deteriorate further, things are going to get very hard. We already face big challenges, and I don’t think we should be under any illusions about that.

We have done some scenario analysis that actually looks beyond five years, towards 2040. Even some of the “muddling through” scenarios for Europe and Social Europe, to be very frank, do not look great. So we need to do things. We cannot simply continue with the status quo.

In that sense, I think Draghi did us a service, even though I don’t agree with everything in his report. He essentially said: look, if we don’t get our act together and move beyond the status quo and the constant “I can’t agree to this, I can’t agree to that,” the outlook is not good. We need some kind of social pact: agreements between member states with different views, between capital and labour, and across political divides.

Maybe it sounds slightly naïve, but people need to recognise that things can get worse and find ways of overcoming some of their differences and making concrete proposals for moving forward. Because if we don’t, things will go downhill. I do think there is scope for a more positive scenario. If we get some tailwinds at the global level and international tensions decline, some of the pressure around huge increases in defence spending could ease.

Technology is another source of optimism. Look at how dramatically the price of solar panels and batteries has declined. I think the price of electric vehicles will also come down considerably. If AI is managed well and fulfils its expectations, I think it can be a force for good. It may not be, but it can be. Higher productivity growth could help us address some fiscal problems and some of the problems connected with demographics.

There are avenues forward. But to be frank, most of them require a stronger European level. Unless we get something like what we had with NextGenerationEU – some sort of central capacity to invest in our common future – it is going to be hard. We need to face up to the fact that even quite large European countries are small on a global scale, and they are becoming smaller in terms of their share of global GDP and their political influence. We need to overcome that fragmentation.

We have seen some positive signs of that happening, but also some limits. We are pushing up against those limits now with the idea of a common European fund or a bigger EU budget. There is a lot of resistance, but we need to overcome it.

So, I am always cautiously optimistic. There is the famous Gramsci quote, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. That is certainly a sort of motto for me personally and, I think, for the institute. We need to do what we can. We need to point things out, make proposals and hope they are picked up by trade unions, political parties, opinion-makers and the media. That is what we do. That is the game we play every day. And it is the game we are trying to win.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. Some answers have been reordered thematically.

The far-right AfD was the undoubted winner of the closely watched state election in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September. Still, the party fell short of an outright majority, in part thanks to a surprisingly strong performance by the Greens. The question now is, can the AfD form a government at all, and if not, what coalition of rivals could possibly agree to govern in its place?

On 6 September, voters cast their ballots in the Saxony-Anhalt widely watched and publicised state election. More than anything, the results have led to a climate of uncertainty and shown a desire for fundamental change. The outcome amounts to a political earthquake whose shockwaves extend far beyond the state’s borders.

43.8 per cent of voters opted for the “confirmed far-right”  Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) state branch (+23 percentage points). The ruling conservative party (CDU/Christian-Democratic Union) was punished; with 17.2 per cent, its share more than halved (-19.9). The liberal party (FDP/Free Democratic Party), which had previously been part of the coalition government, was ousted from the state parliament in Saxony-Anhalt, whilst the social democrats (SPD/Social Democratic Party), also part of the coalition, made a slight gain but remained at a low level (9.3/+0.9).

On the other hand, the Greens made a surprisingly significant gain, achieving their best result to date with 8.9 per cent (+3.0). They were the strongest force in terms of second votes in the Halle III constituency (33.7 per cent; lowest second-vote result: Eisleben constituency, 3.8 per cent). The Left lost ground again (8.6/-2.4), but managed to win three constituency seats outright (Halle II, III; Magdeburg II). The newly formed BSW (Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht/Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht; a party positioned towards the left economically and towards the right culturally) cleared the 5 per cent threshold.

The election results and accompanying opinion polls reveal a highly politicised, deeply divided state. Voter turnout soared to a record high of 77.8 per cent (+17.5), continuing the trend of rising participation. The previously ruling coalition of the CDU, the SPD, and the FDP has been voted out of office. In the new parliament, forming a government will prove exceedingly difficult, and the BSW is expected to play a key role in any possible coalition.

Chart: Heinrich Böll Foundation. Source: State Returning Officer of Saxony-Anhalt

The new normal?

Although just over 1.7 million people were eligible to vote in Saxony-Anhalt, the vote was closely monitored in and outside Germany. The reasons for this extraordinary attention are clear: polls indicated that the AfD would become by far the strongest force, as had already been the case in the 2024 Thuringia state election and in the 2024 local elections in Saxony-Anhalt. What was new, however, were the poll figures for the AfD and, consequently, the question of whether the AfD’s state branch – classified as “undoubtedly far-right” – would provide the Minister-President with an absolute parliamentary majority.

This possibility of a government with a far-right character, unprecedented in Germany since 1945, led to an intense media, political and societal debate about the potential consequences for democracy in the country. As a result, the election was subject to unusually extensive scrutiny. At the same time, however, the consequences of the election were discussed in an unusually broad and multifaceted manner, which at least gave voters the opportunity to reflect on the significance and consequences of their voting decisions far more deeply than usual.

However, for two reasons it would be unrealistic to view the state election as essentially an exceptional case. On the one hand, whilst the scale of targeted disinformation, fake news, and defamation – extending even to the acceptance of politically motivated threats and acts of violence from the far right – has indeed risen once again, it is no longer an exceptional case: whether through hybrid attacks and campaigns from abroad (particularly from Russia) or targeted delegitimisation from within (by AfD politicians and right-wing influencers), the aim was to influence the elections directly and to gradually undermine democracy as a whole. The authoritarian playbook for delegitimising democracy has now found its way into the German federal system.

On the other hand, from a sociological perspective, there is much to suggest that the election result, whilst differing in scale, follows the same underlying pattern as a broader societal trend. The AfD has long been a nationwide phenomenon; it is merely the structural conditions and social stabilisers that differ. This explains the variations between the federal states, particularly in times of global uncertainty (e.g. party loyalty, economic structures, collective bargaining coverage, etc.).

Social divisions

The state election in Saxony-Anhalt took place against a backdrop of general pessimism. Whilst this is not unusual in itself, this election year is also characterised by widespread dissatisfaction with the state government and persistent, deep-seated dissatisfaction with the federal government, which goes beyond the negative assessment of the “traffic light” coalition.

A large majority of citizens in Saxony-Anhalt are concerned about the state of affairs in Germany (here and below: Infratest dimap: Saxony-Anhalt ahead of the 2026 election), both regarding the future of democracy and economic development. Concerns are widespread across the population and in all political circles, yet the differences in the details highlight the division within the state. Pronounced fears of inflation and social decline are a defining feature (feeling overwhelmed by price rises: 70 per cent; standard of living under threat: 58 per cent). These concerns are, in part, entirely justified: Saxony-Anhalt has many structurally weak rural areas struggling with an ageing population, and the “Chemical Triangle” in the south of the state is also in the throes of a deep crisis, whilst other plans for new industrial settlements, such as that involving Intel, have failed.

Combined with lower net worth and a lower uptake of transition support schemes, many employees therefore fear that their own jobs – and thus their livelihoods – are at risk, whilst a large share of (future) pensioners are critical of the federal government’s reforms. The survey data clearly show that this fear of loss – partly real, partly perceived – has been exploited politically, particularly by the Right. AfD supporters, in particular, fear they will no longer be able to pay their bills (89 per cent; overall: 70 per cent) or maintain their standard of living (80 per cent; overall: 58 per cent). Supporters of the Left share these fears roughly in line with the overall average, whereas supporters of the CDU, the SPD, and the Greens do so to a far lesser extent. This shows that the divide is clearly discernible along the lines of economic fears.

Furthermore, whilst concern for democracy and the rule of law is shared across all social groups and political currents, there are significant differences in the interpretation of exactly what the threats consist of: Only AfD supporters are more likely than average to see the country’s way of life as under threat or to complain about there being too many foreigners in the country. In addition, only a majority of AfD supporters do not see Russia as a threat. In other words, the perception of these issues among AfD supporters differs fundamentally from that of other parties’ supporters (BSW, FDP: not shown). Thus, whilst the vast majority of people in the country are concerned, their reasons vary greatly and clearly follow party lines (often pitting the AfD against the CDU, the SPD, and the Greens), suggesting that right-wing narratives and interpretative frameworks exert a strong persuasive influence in receptive circles.

This is also confirmed by the splitting analysis of the Infratest dimap post-election survey: neither did AfD first-vote voters cast their second votes for other parties to any significant extent, nor did the AfD list receive a significant number of additional votes from first-vote voters of other parties. The AfD’s voter base is therefore, on the one hand, clearly cohesive, but on the other hand, as the results show, broadly anchored in society: in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is the dominant force in almost all regions, social milieus and demographic groups. It won 38 out of 41 constituencies outright; only in three urban constituencies was the Left able to secure a direct mandate. In only one constituency is the AfD not the strongest force in terms of second votes, achieving less than 20 per cent, whereas the Greens became the strongest force by second votes in that constituency (Halle III).

With the exception of civil servants and older voters, the AfD was consistently the strongest force and recorded double-digit gains, particularly among young men and voters with a lower level of formal education (except among civil servants; data here and below: Infratest dimap: Election Analysis). The party has gained across the political spectrum, but most significantly from the CDU, the group of minor parties, and above all, through the mobilisation of former non-voters.

Voting motives continue to be characterised by protest voting (in particular as a protest against the federal government), but to a far greater extent than before also by conviction in the party, its ability to address issues and its policy platform, as well as, to a significant degree, in its lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund: according to their own statements, four in ten AfD voters chose the party because of him. AfD voters were almost unanimously in favour of a state government led by their party and its lead candidate.

Map: Heinrich Böll Foundation. Source: State Returning Officer of Saxony-Anhalt. Map data: © GeoBasis-DE / LVermGeo ST dl-de/by-2-0

Dizzying coalition arithmetic

The widely differing perceptions of the situation and the clear divide between the electorate ultimately also shape perceptions of the government’s work at the federal level and, above all, at the state level. Whilst the majority of supporters of the CDU, the SPD, and even the Greens were generally satisfied with their state government, supporters of The Left, and above all the AfD, express clear dissatisfaction. The extent to which these camps have solidified is also demonstrated by the massive shift in the attribution of competence and in preferences for the Minister-President: supporters of the AfD favour “their” party on these points and reject all others across the board, and vice versa.

This clear polarisation of the two blocs against one another is by no means new and is the reason why cooperation between the AfD and the CDU would most likely be to the detriment of the latter: the election in Saxony-Anhalt clearly shows how deeply the AfD has penetrated among the middle class with a charismatic lead candidate and a positive, mood-driven campaign in times of uncertainty. Whilst the AfD has recently focused primarily on mobilising its core electorate in the west, its support in the east – particularly in this election – has already broadened considerably, meaning it has become socially normalised.

Looking ahead to the formation of the next government, this means that the difficulties in securing a majority are not merely a matter of party tactics, but are clearly rooted in policy issues and voter preferences. Everything points to an extremely difficult process of forming a government. If one assumes the model of a majority government (rather than a minority government with shifting majorities), no simple solution is in sight. With 39 seats each for the AfD on the one hand, and the CDU, the SPD, the Greens, and the Left Party on the other, there is a deadlock; 42 votes are required for an absolute majority.

The AfD reversed course immediately after the election, saying it no longer regards an absolute majority of its own as a prerequisite to governing, and that, for the time being, it only sees the need for a reliable majority. This could be achieved through a coalition or at least a firm cooperation agreement with the BSW. A CDU-led coalition against the AfD, on the other hand, would require the involvement of all the other parties in the state parliament – namely the Left , the Greens, the SPD, the CDU, and the BSW – a highly unlikely scenario. Consequently, the idea of a cross-party Minister-President, which the BSW has once again brought into the discussion, takes on a certain relevance: assuming this person were acceptable to the entire democratic spectrum, the BSW could thus play a decisive role in the election of a democratically supported Minister-President.

That said, by being prepared to abstain in the third round of voting, the BSW also has the opportunity, for the first time, to help a Minister-President from a confirmed far-right party into office. This would not be without further complications: the five abstentions would help the AfD but would not break the deadlock. To do so, at least one further vote, one more abstention, or an absence from the vote by one of the other parliamentary groups would be required.

It is now up to the BSW to decide which side to support, but a minority government cannot be entirely ruled out. Saxony-Anhalt, in particular, is one of the few federal states with long-standing experience of this form of government, which is atypical in Germany (except for the “Magdeburg Model”, an SPD minority government from 1994 to 2002). Saxony-Anhalt is characterised not only by high volatility and low party loyalty, but also by a willingness to embrace new coalition models (the “Kenya Coalition” comprising the CDU, the SPD, and the Greens, or the “Germany Coalition” comprising the CDU, the SPD and the FDP).

Chart: Heinrich Böll Foundation Source: State Returning Officer of Saxony-Anhalt

What will the Greens do now?

There was a lot at stake for the Greens in this election, as they had recently been struggling, particularly in the eastern German federal states. In Thuringia and Brandenburg, the Greens lost their parliamentary status in 2024, and this election risked repeating that. However, the outcome – surprising to some extent – turned out differently: the Greens have achieved their best-ever result in a state election in Saxony-Anhalt. The structural patterns in electoral sociology are unremarkable, and the motives for voting also match expectations: for three-quarters of their voters, the decisive reason for voting for the Greens was policy-based considerations, coupled with a unanimous rejection of an AfD government and a clear preference for a CDU-led state government.

And yet something is different. The election result is largely attributable to the debates and initiatives promoting tactical voting: the aim was to prevent the AfD from securing an absolute majority – and thus taking power – by ensuring that the Greens and the SPD retained their seats in the state parliament. Whilst the former objective was achieved, the question of who will form the government remains unanswered.

Although up until July the polls gave little indication that the Greens would return to the state parliament, they managed to capitalise on the window of opportunity presented by this election. They benefited not only from CDU swing voters, but also from the mobilisation of former non-voters. This election campaign was underpinned by disciplined communication and unusually strong support from the entire party – from the party leadership and prominent figures, as well as from many members – but also from figures such as former Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck and Baden-Württemberg’s Minister-President Cem Özdemir.

After the Saxony-Anhalt elections, Özdemir summed up the central responsibility of the Greens – and indeed of all parties – as follows: “What is required is honest and unsparing self-criticism from all democratic parties, leading to a dramatic change in the way we all conduct politics, both in form and substance. Less squabbling, fewer promises, more honest listening, and shared outcomes. Saying what is possible and saying what is not.”

This article was first published in German by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. The English version is taken from the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Brussels.

With less than a year to go before France’s presidential election, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen seems almost certain to reach the run-off. Her party’s fortunes have continued to rise in recent years thanks to its leaders’ ability to rally working-class voters while securing support from business elites. Tensions between these two bases remain, but they are unlikely to come to a head before the vote.

Marine Le Pen is no stranger to strategic ambiguity. She has existed in this state for the past year, promoting Jordan Bardella as a potential presidential candidate for the Rassemblement National (RN) in 2027, but not ruling out running herself if the courts decided to reduce her sentence for embezzlement of public funds.

In July, her sentence was reduced to three years in prison, two suspended, one under house arrest. Her ineligibility for public office was cut to 15 months. Because she had already served this since the first verdict, her path to the presidency reopened, and she immediately threw her hat back into the ring.

Le Pen has already launched an appeal against the new sentence too, at the Cour de Cassation, France’s supreme court. Depending on when this judgement is delivered, she may have to face an ignominious end to the election campaign, spending the last few days wearing an electronic ankle tag and under curfew. If she is lucky, however, the sluggish timeline of French justice may spare her a verdict until after the second round, by which point she hopes to have presidential immunity.

Candidate, or perhaps not. Ankle tag, or perhaps not. The uncertainty of the French justice system is not where the ambiguity ends either: Le Pen’s bid for the Élysée Palace rests on her ability to maintain unity between different fractions of her base that have competing interests.

A short-lived social turn

When Le Pen achieved her first major breakthrough, advancing to the second round of the presidential election in 2017, she did so off the back of a “social turn”. Advised by Florian Philippot, then vice-president of the Front National (now RN), she ran on a platform of retirement at 60, scrapping the 2016 labour reform which restricted workers’ rights, fighting against tax evasion, and maintaining the 35-hour work week and the wealth tax, amid a host of other statist measures.

Ten years on, […] Le Pen has dropped her social commitments as opportunistically as she initially picked them up.

During the campaign, she attacked Le Siècle, an elite cross-partisan social club that she described as a secret meeting point of the oligarchy. She borrowed the slogans of populist left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon to appeal to his voters in the second round, calling them to “dégagez-les” (“throw them out”), a direct echo of his call to “dégagez-les tous” (“throw them all out”). She even quoted the Socialist leader of the early 20th century, Jean-Jaurès, but it was to no avail. She had spent the 2017 campaign talking up the benefits of euro-exit and Frexit, which business and 70 per cent of the French public strongly opposed. At the last minute, she tried to backpedal but failed to convince the electorate. Her campaign ended with a bruising debate against Emmanuel Macron in which she appeared not to understand her own economic policies.

Ten years on, little remains of that Marine Le Pen. As part of the de-demonisation strategy of rendering the RN palatable, she has dropped her social commitments as opportunistically as she initially picked them up.

Unlike in the US or the UK, companies in France cannot donate to political campaigns, and donations from private citizens are capped at 7,500 euros. Industry thus doesn’t intervene as directly in the democratic process as the cryptocurrency and fossil fuels interests backing Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Similarly, because of the RN’s ties to historical fascism, business has previously been wary of being seen to associate with the party, to the point that the Front National couldn’t even access French bank loans.

Nonetheless, since 2024, when the Rassemblement National became the largest individual party in both the European Parliament and the French National Assembly, the RN and big business have gradually moved closer. This has been in no small part thanks to Jordan Bardella, the young gun who would have replaced Le Pen if the courts had rejected her appeal. Bardella, who is just 30 years old and currently dating an aristocrat, believes the RN needs to expand beyond its working-class and struggling petit-bourgeois base into the affluent classes. He sees austerity as a core part of the RN’s project: in 2024, he proclaimed the need for “order in the streets and order in the public accounts”.

Party of capital

Two additional factors have enabled the RN to become a standard party of capital: support from oligarchs, and an attempt by centrists to paint the Left as the real extremists, letting the RN off the hook.

Media moguls Vincent Bolloré and Pierre Édouard Stérin relentlessly platform the party and talk up its preferred themes in the media (although they also boost other right-wing forces, like Éric Zemmour’s party Reconquête, various other Catholic reactionaries, and what remains of the Sarkozyist right). François Durvye, a former hedge fund manager for Stérin and a special advisor to Bardella, was tasked with establishing relationships with the business elite. Durvye recently quit the party, but in a parting shot, he claimed he was unable to reconcile himself to Le Pen’s insufficiently neoliberal positions. In reality, reporting in Libération and Mediapart suggests that his departure was largely an ego-driven firing by Le Pen, who made clear that his days were numbered after he had unsubtly expressed his dissatisfaction to various RN bigwigs that she – and not Bardella – was running for president. This was not an ideological purge. Bardella, and his other economically liberal advisors like Ambroise de Rancourt, remain part of Le Pen’s campaign team. On 29 August, the party announced that, if it gained power, it would enshrine a “golden rule” of keeping the deficit below 3 per cent in the constitution.

Durvye and Bardella’s strenuous efforts to sign up to the agenda of the patronat – France’s business establishment – appear to be working. In 2011, Laurence Parisot, then head of the business lobby MEDEF, denounced Le Pen, accusing her of sitting squarely within the far-right tradition. By 2025, Bardella was a guest at the MEDEF summer university, keen to demonstrate that the party was abandoning any statist economic policies it may have previously favoured. In 2026, he was invited back for a working lunch, which he later described as “courteous”. The rapprochement extends to Le Pen herself: In April, she dined with influential corporate leaders including France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, the owner of luxury goods firm LVMH, who backed Macron in 2017 and 2022 and is a personal friend of Vincent Bolloré.

The institutions representing business interests are taking the RN seriously because the polls currently show Le Pen/Bardella making it into the second round in all scenarios, and likely beating their opponent in the runoff. Business leaders feel they have to suss out the potential next party of government. They also fear the alternative: though centrist candidates seem to stand a better chance of making it to the second round, some polling scenarios show the RN candidate facing off against Mélenchon, who is himself running for the fourth time.

The centrist parties have already supplied the arguments for business to back the far right, treating Mélenchon and his party La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”, LFI) as an equivalent “extreme” to the RN, while also slowly turning the framework of demonisation away from the RN and onto LFI. In 2024, the newspaper Libération revealed secret dinners between Édouard Philippe, the likely candidate of the Macron camp, and Marine Le Pen. At one of these dinners, Philippe reportedly said that he wanted the next election to be between his camp and the far right; an election of “project against project, without moral critique”, according to the revelations. Last year, Bruno Retailleau, head of the right-wing Les Républicains party and former interior minister under Macron, called for a united “republican front” including the RN against LFI. Most of the attacks from the Macron camp on the RN have thus far concentrated on the party’s economic irresponsibility, based often on the promises they made during their brief social turn.

In this context, business has little work to do to abandon republicanism and justify a swing behind the RN. In the 2026 Toulouse municipal election, local industrial leaders threatened to cancel investments or to pull their businesses from the city if LFI candidate François Piquemal beat Macronist Jean-Luc Moudenc. Business and industrial leaders are primed to take this one step further and come out against LFI in future LFI-RN runoffs. As Bernard Cohen, the head of a lobby group representing the interests of small- and medium-sized businesses put it recently: “whether they are small, medium or large, what the bosses like generally is financial and economic stability […] economic danger for the bosses comes not from the Left of government, but a certain section of the Left; by which they mean LFI”.

For their part, the unions, or at least the more radical ones, have started to push back against the bosses creeping toward the RN. In August, Sophie Binet, the leader of the CGT, denounced MEDEF in an interview with Le Monde for helping roll out the red carpet to the far right. She argued that the party’s economic position was irrelevant and that business leaders should be thinking about the RN’s programme regarding women, LGBT rights, climate change, the constitution, and the independence of the judiciary, rather than any economic reforms that the bosses might favour.

The standard position across the unions is that the far right is a unique and dangerous threat to the republic, to which any other political force is preferable. The Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front; a broad left-wing electoral alliance in France) was endorsed in 2024 because it was a rare instance of left unity. In other words, the unions wouldn’t burn any bridges by backing it. In 2024, the leaderships of various unions condemned media outlets and politicians trying to invoke a false equivalence between LFI and the far right, but they prefer to remain relatively politically neutral, not least because the leadership of LFI and union leaders have butted heads over strategy many times.

Kicking the can

The RN’s move closer to its roots on the economy poses problems for the coalition that it is trying to build over the long term. The party has no meaningful answer to how it reconciles the interests of its working-class and petit-bourgeois voters with those of the oligarchs that now back it.

For example, the RN has been keen to position itself as the party of French agriculture, and has allied closely with small farmers who smile in selfies with Bardella. These traditionalist farmers are the kinds of people who oppose the over-financialisation of agriculture and the mass purchase of land by agri-giants like Otium, owned by Pierre Edouard Stérin, one of the oligarchs instrumental in smoothing the party’s path to power. When iron and steel colossus ArcelorMittal entered crisis due to global overcapacity, the company closed two sites and said it would cut a further 600 jobs. The RN attacked Macron incessantly, but when LFI proposed a vote on nationalising the firm, it abstained, fearing it would alienate business.

The party has also opposed wealth taxes as well as taxes on private jets. It promises a better life for workers through horizontal redistribution away from immigrants, welfare cheats, the recipients of overseas development aid, and a very optimistic assessment of government waste. It also proposes cutting France’s contributions to the EU, which could ultimately result in reduced subsidies for its agricultural base. In the RN’s 2026 counter-budget, the party put forward proposals for deeper austerity than the Macronist government, arguing for 36 billion euros in savings compared to prime minister Sébastien Lecornu’s 30 billion. In short, the RN is back to the ultra-racist Reaganism that defined the party under Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father.

The party has no meaningful answer to how it reconciles the interests of its working-class and petit-bourgeois voters with those of the oligarchs that now back it.

To obviate the conflict between the interests the RN is trying to represent, Marine Le Pen defaults to unity through nationalism. She talks in the language of the people and presents the struggle as a national one against a cosmopolitan establishment. As political scientist Théo Bourgeron has observed, Le Pen kicks down the road the difficult spending tradeoffs that will arise when not enough government waste is found to cover what remains of the party’s social commitments.

Where there is a genuine tension in the strategy is Le Pen’s disagreement with Bardella (and previously Durvye) over pensions. Bardella used the period when he was the likely presidential candidate to argue against Le Pen’s position on the subject. Fearful of alienating the party’s older working-class base, she wants to roll back Macron’s pension reforms and revert the retirement age to 62. Bardella, by contrast, wants to keep the reform and is even considering scrapping a rule that allows people to retire at 67 on full pension, aiming to replace it instead with a minimum of 42 years of contribution, or the option to take a smaller pension. While it does open the party up to accusations of abandoning its base, even this tension could work in the RN’s benefit. Candidate once more, Le Pen can set the line in favour of the lower pension age, while Bardella privately reassures his newfound friends in MEDEF that he will do his utmost to lobby for a higher one when in power.

Maintaining the coalition

For the moment, this tension seems unlikely to pose too many problems for the RN. The far right does not have a monopoly on the working class, most of whom choose abstention, and many of whom vote for left-wing parties. It is true, however, that the voters they do have, including those among the working class, are unlikely to be fazed by the imprecision on economic questions and the cosiness with big business. Félicien Faury’s Des électeurs ordinaires (“Ordinary Voters”), a study of the RN electorate, has demonstrated the importance of race and identity to the far-right vote. He has amassed ample evidence that RN voters tend to feel that the distributional conflicts in society are almost entirely between natives and immigrants, not between social classes, and that they generally share the low-tax impulses of the Grand Patrons – France’s most influential corporate bosses.

The contradictions of the RN aren’t likely to be confronted on the ground or in the media. Although LFI speaks in the language of class conflict and is committed to highlighting RN hypocrisy, Mélenchon’s strategy is to assemble a “New France” of public sector workers, educated young people, and the urban, often racialised working class. This means that they will spend limited time and resources during the campaign in the working-class areas where the far right is strongest, because their strategy is not premised on converting far-right voters, but on building an alternative coalition by activating abstentionists to reach the second round.

There is a certain logic to Mélenchon’s gamble. Abstentionists are sociologically closer to left-wing voters, and have values that more closely resemble those of the left bloc than those of the centre or the far right. The French presidential election accounts only for raw numbers, not the geographic distribution of voters, so there is a lot to be gained for a Left concentrated primarily on winning votes in densely populated urban areas.

Polling hypotheticals show Mélenchon, currently the only left candidate with a plausible shot of making it to the second round, being destroyed by both Le Pen and Bardella in a runoff. To this, the Insoumis retort that polls always underestimate Mélenchon and overrate Le Pen. They argue that the extra votes from the abstentionists they hope to activate can be combined with the same dynamic that made the New Popular Front, a broad left-wing electoral alliance, win the legislative elections in 2024 (albeit without a majority), when enough centrist voters chose to block the far right.

Mélenchon’s candidacy remains a long shot, though his campaign is progressing well. The far right’s unity is currently being held in place by proximity to power. Commonalities are emphasised and differences dissolved by the possibility that Marine Le Pen might soon be in the Élysée. If Mélenchon wins, the factions will compete to establish the post-Le Pen orientation of the far-right bloc. If she (or a candidate of post-Macronism) wins, then the reverse occurs: the Left will be scrambled, and the succession battle will play out among the interest groups and political tendencies to the left of Macron. For now, the far right’s contradictions are likely to remain unresolved.

Long before ecology entered the political mainstream, Bernard Charbonneau was already diagnosing a central paradox of the modern age: that the more we master nature, the less we can experience freedom. Nothing illustrates this better than mass tourism: born from an authentic desire to escape the city, it ends up dragging the city’s crowds, concrete, and regulations wherever it goes.

“We cannot pursue infinite development in a finite world.”1 Bernard Charbonneau (1910–1996) undoubtedly had a way with words. Sadly, this did not secure him his rightful place in history as one of the most singular and appealing thinkers of the twentieth century. A few people do still mention him, often in the same breath as Jacques Ellul, but they often erroneously think the lives and ideas of these two Bordeaux thinkers are interchangeable.

Admittedly, from an early espousal of personalism to the fight to preserve the Aquitaine coast, they shared many dreams and fought for many of the same causes. There is more that unites them than divides them. But Charbonneau’s work was not only more literary, but also more philosophical, more applied, and most of all more directly engaged with ecological issues than Ellul’s. The latter said that his friend Charbonneau “taught me how to think and how to be a free spirit”.2

When, at the 2002 Johannesburg summit, Jacques Chirac spoke the now-famous words “our house is burning down and we’re blind to it”, readers of Charbonneau heard an echo of a remark made first in 1977 in the pages of Foi & Vie – “forced to think in a house that has caught on fire”, and again in 1980 in The Green Light: “Our paradox is that of having to hurry slowly, being commanded to reflect in a house that is on fire.”3

In terms of realising the urgency of ecological issues, Charbonneau was a pioneer. But to merely stress how early his warnings were, or the foresight of his analysis of how techno-industrial society destroys nature while also fuelling a need for it, is to overlook other important contributions. Even if we limit ourselves to the ecological aspects of his work, his singular approach meant he was not only a precursor to, but also an actor in and critical observer of a movement transformed by the pursuit of “changing politics”.

Bernard Charbonneau thought philosophically about his life and lived out his philosophy. Fully. Intensely. What made him such a major pioneer of degrowth and political ecology in twentieth-century France?

Bernard Charbonneau. Image by D.L.C. via Wikimedia Commons A pioneer

His awareness of these issues did not come from books. “I saw car culture arrive in my own street,” he explained in an interview.4 Growing up in Bordeaux, he was a rebel who was constantly trying to get out of the city by any means possible, on foot, at the height of the scouting movement, by train, or with small groups of friends as a sixth-former and student. He would pitch his tent in the middle of the countryside, in the forests and mountains on both sides of the Pyrenees, and fish with his bare hands in rivers and lakes.

From a young age, he was convinced that freedom could only be experienced in direct contact with nature. His understanding of freedom was an applied one, and his love of nature was physical. He felt he was watching what he called a “Great Metamorphosis”, a profound transformation in human beings caused by the acceleration of science and technology. He believed that the First World War, which he referred to as the first “total war” in history, played a significant role in this process.

At the start of the 1930s, he rejected both the liberal figure of the detached individual and the role of political soldier glorified by totalitarian countries. Instead, he sought an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-Stalinist movement. He travelled to Paris in 1933 to meet Emmanuel Mounier and to affiliate his small discussion group with the Esprit movement. It was in that personalist journal that his first feature article appeared, entitled “La publicité” (“Advertising”).5 He remarked that “advertising has swamped everything, our newspapers, our roads, no-one notices it anymore, but we need to deconstruct it.” It is “assisted by the invention of means of persuasion that can make lies more real than reality.” A creator of artificial needs, it goes unseen because it is ubiquitous: “Anyone who could clip the wings of advertising would make a hundred times as deep a change to our civilisation as any political initiative could achieve.”

In 1935, he and Jacques Ellul wrote the first Western proposal to voluntarily limit growth in the twentieth century: “Directives pour un manifeste personnaliste”.6 This text made the Bordeaux group the figurehead of the most libertarian, Girondist, regionalist, federalist strand of the personalist movement, and most significantly that which was most focused on ecology and degrowth (avant la lettre). “We are revolutionaries in spite of ourselves,” explained the authors. A searing indictment of the productivism of industrial civilisation and the power of money, the manifesto critiqued giantism, the way modern technology tends to concentrate capital, populations and the state. It railed against widespread proletarianisation: “Once man consents to no longer being the measure of his world, he relinquishes the very possibility of moderation.”

The manifesto advocated in favour of elective communities rather than large cities, small voluntary groupings that were rooted in a particular place, a city on a human scale, politics founded on direct, transparent communication between the governors and the governed, and countries divided into regions with a pared-back central state. It also argued for bottom-up federalism to coordinate these autonomous units, reorienting technology to fulfil the most arduous tasks, reducing working hours, providing a universal basic income, banning the charging of interest on loans, regulating advertising, and a property system focused on the effective enjoyment of goods. Both poverty and wealth needed to be tackled, as “people are dying of a desperate desire for the enjoyment of material things, and others of not having access to those things.” The themes of the dual society that blossomed forty years later with André Gorz and Serge Moscovici are already visible here, even if expressed in a different way.

In Le sentiment de la nature, force révolutionnaire (1937),7 Charbonneau expanded on the manifesto’s degrowth theme and systematised his thoughts on the relationship between humans and their environment. This text made him France’s foremost twentieth-century theoretician of political ecology. Following the anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus, with whose thought he was closely aligned, but whom he never quoted, he remarked that “we don’t need a Sunday in the countryside, we need a less artificial life.” His key message here was that modern technology makes us more comfortable, but removes the joy of simple pleasures, and that what we gain in safety and security we lose in liberty. “Feeling for nature” should be to personalism what class consciousness had been to socialism: reason made flesh.

Charbonneau made sacrifices in order to live ever further from urban centres. A teacher of history and geography in Bourges, Biarritz, Bordeaux and Pau, he successfully applied for a transfer to Lescar in 1945, and went to work in a small teacher training college. Living in almost complete mental and intellectual solitude, he threw himself into writing a manuscript of over a thousand closely written pages, entitled Par la force des choses, which contained the kernel of fifteen of his books.

The work analysed the contradictions of industrial civilisation, anticipating the risk of “social totalisation”, which would be worse than political totalitarianism, caused by the acceleration of technological progress. It showed how industrial society destroyed nature, while fuelling a feeling of desire for it. It criticised the “exponential development” of advertising and propaganda in daily life, and anticipated the liquidation of peasant agriculture, the destruction of the countryside and of landscapes, the increasing ugliness of cities and suburbs, and the bureaucratisation of existence, subject to an administrative apparatus that restricts the capacity to feel freedom.

In order to publish “the hulk”, as he nicknamed it, Charbonneau had to break it down into sections, which were then circulated among a very limited readership. In 1946, he resumed his nature discussion camps, where he used the ideas of Georges Bernanos and Aldous Huxley to think about the post-Hiroshima world. His ecologist, libertarian discourse still went unheard outside of his circle of admirers. He had to pay to publish his books, except for a few titles such as Dimanche et Lundi (1966) and L’Hommauto (1967).

His masterwork, Le Jardin de Babylone (Gallimard, 1969), was published at the moment that the environmental movement picked up pace, with the creation of France Nature Environnement in 1968 and Friends of the Earth in 1969. Ecology finally had the green light. Charbonneau was active on all its fronts, despite being in the early years of his retirement, which he would have preferred to spend indulging his passion for trout fishing. He was involved in the Soussouéou defence committee, which succeeded in preventing the construction of a high-altitude ski resort; he protested against the development of a tourist destination in a Basque Country forest; and he campaigned in Soule alongside the Association au service des agriculteurs montagnards (Mountain Farmers’ Association).

Image by Axlferrari via Wikimedia Commons

In 1971, he co-founded the Pyrénées-Atlantiques division of the Société pour l’étude, la protection et l’aménagement de la nature dans le Sud-Ouest (Society for the Study, Protection, and Planning of Nature in the South West), with one of its aims being to fight against the opening of new quarries and gravel pits, and plans for marinas on the Gave d’Ossau river. The same year, he began his “Chronique de l’an deux mille” column in Foi & Vie, which was largely devoted to ecology. In 1972, he was a close associate of Pierre Fournier (journalist at Hara-Kiri and later Charlie hebdo) when Fournier founded La Gueule ouverte – “the newspaper that heralds the end of the world” – a proudly “radical and global” publication. From the second edition onwards, Charbonneau wrote a “Chronique du terrain vague” column, in which he argued in favour of an alliance between ecologists and farmers against “industrial totalitarianism”.

In 1974, the editor of Combat nature, “the journal of ecology associations and environmental protection”, asked him to provide a philosophical foundation for the movement. He did so until his death. Simultaneously, he waged a battle against the government, which was attempting to hand over coastal land to developers looking to promote large-scale tourism in Gironde and Landes under the guise of town and country planning measures.

Charbonneau created the Comité de défense de la côte aquitaine (Aquitaine Coast Defence Committee, CDCA), which brought together citizens, Occitan activists, and “leftists” of various kinds to fight against the resortification of the coast, which would have involved the building of hotels, fast roads, ports, marinas, golf courses, etc. The CDCA organised media campaigns and demonstrations, and provided independent expertise to counter the government machine.

Charbonneau did not only take on local challenges. In 1976, he was among the founders of the federalist, anti-nuclear European Network for Ecological Reflection and Action (ECOROPA). He was seventy when he published The Green Light. In 1982, he and Jacques Ellul created the Groupe du Chêne, a small-scale working group that aimed to act as a kind of thinktank for the entire ecology movement. Because he always sought to place the question of humanity’s relationship to nature at the heart of politics, he disapproved of the creation of environmental parties, on the model of the German Greens.

His was an applied approach, in which his thought was the richer for his actions, and his actions the richer for his thought. Running the risk of oversimplification, we might summarise it in one sentence: Humans need nature as much as they need freedom, but techno-industrial society threatens the former as well as the latter.

An ecologist unlike any other

Charbonneau lambasted the standardisation of taste and the harmful effects of agroindustry, which eradicated not only the peasant way of life but landscapes and food with a genuine connection to the land from which it came. He highlighted the paradox of mass tourism, which came from an authentic desire to escape from city life, but which pillaged the spaces these fugitives discover and brought with it exactly what the city-dwelling tourist was trying to escape: overcrowding, concrete, and regulations.

“Nature is both the mother who has given birth to us, and the daughter we have conceived; should she disappear, humanity itself will regress into chaos.”8 Our bodies mean we belong to nature, but at the same time, we are called to go beyond it. Our duty, he argued, is to always keep these two considerations in mind. Humanity is part of nature, as nature is the origin of our aesthetic, physical, sensual and even spiritual joys. But when humanity comes out of nature, as a child comes out of its mother, it becomes something separate. Humanity must give life meaning, at each instant, through its quest for freedom; for nature, as a majestic entity, does not exist. Not only is a feeling for nature a modern invention, but it is also primarily found among civilised rather than “primitive” people, the bourgeois rather than peasants, city-dwellers rather than country folk.

Charbonneau thought that it was not so much nature that was threatened by the cult of progress as human freedom. The desire to seek infinite development in a finite world disrupts both nature and freedom, since humanity has a dialectic relationship with nature. Our freedom commands us to master nature, but if we destroy it, or even impose structure on it, we are simultaneously destroying our ability to experience our own freedom. What is the point of leaving behind the constraints of urban life at a set time each year, only to encounter them reproduced in miniature in another location?

To find nature again, we must first understand that we have lost it. For Charbonneau, nature was thus our own freedom by another name. Our feeling for nature is one and the same as our awareness of our own lives. Freedom is not one value among others, but the starting point from which all else follows. A common pitfall among intellectuals is to adopt an idealist, absolutist vision of freedom, rather than living it, in its prosaic, relative reality. When Charbonneau railed against “industrial totalitarianism”, he was unafraid of using a concept usually reserved for fascist and communist regimes to describe the trajectory of all modern societies.

To find nature again, we must first understand that we have lost it.

In his eyes, the process had entered its final stages: “You can get on a plane, but you can’t truly ever get off.”9 The last “natural” spaces were being slowly conquered by the tourism industry, and everyone and everywhere was becoming part of industrial society. Modern tourism is a social fact that presupposes a level of structure, which is the opposite of what we look for in our contact with nature: the feeling of freedom. The structure of tourism has become a keystone of techno-industrial society.

Charbonneau considered tourism to be the most destructive industry of all, because it is driven by the quest for and consumption of space. The less space there is, the higher the demand; the more nature disappears, the more city-dwellers feel a need for it. He summarised this phenomenon thus: “Because there are machines, people get into machines in order to flee from the machine … the crowd flees from the crowd, the civilised from civilisation. This is how nature is disappearing, destroyed by the very feeling that it arouses, as much as by the expansion of industry.”10 Under capitalism, tourism has become a form of heavy industry, mass-producing standardised products.

Charbonneau does not offer any neat solutions, but instead suggests a direction of travel: accepting limits, and recognising the finite nature of earthly space-time. In practice, this means ceilings on visitor numbers for islands, caves, historic sites, and monuments of various kinds. Tourism must be made to tread lighter and be more thinly spread. We should reject our current approach to building next to beaches and ski slopes, opting for campsites and wooden buildings rather than towers of glass and steel, existing small hotels rather than hotel complexes, and small roads rather than motorways.

This artisanal tourism would create jobs and most importantly be kinder to natural environments, as it would mean new motorways would not be built. Some spaces must be kept unstructured. This is why Charbonneau rejected the national park system, which results in an under-protected zone just outside the boundary, and an over-protected zone within it. Rather than letting land wither away all the better to hand it over to developers, he argued it was better to tend it in such a way that the inhabitants could welcome visitors.

Charbonneau believed that humans need to re-establish a normal relationship with space. As space is linked to time, speed crushes it, while a more leisurely pace allows it to unfold. This is why he was in favour of cycling and walking. Moving slowly reveals the richness of the land. When we visit somewhere in a way that “takes time”, we get knowledge and experience in return. Sedentary approaches must be prioritised over nomadic ones. Why is it supposed to be pleasurable to be shipped about like a parcel to “get an eyeful” of an increasingly superficial and stereotyped tourist attraction? It would be better to tend our own garden, if we have one, or decorate our flat, or to paint, sculpt, or play an instrument. We should focus on things that calm us, slow us down, and root us, anything that can turn us from a tourist into an “embedded inhabitant”.

Charbonneau wanted to combat speculation by banning property companies from buying farms and estates, but he thought that rather than lambasting second homes – a catch-all category – it would be better to help them to become primary residences. He suggested renovating small and medium-sized dwellings, which would either be physically and spiritually owned and dwelt in by their owners, or let out, which would have the advantage of restoring built rural heritage.

Against car culture

Above a certain level, progress does not make food any better or more nutritious, and likewise improvements in transport do not make journeys any better: “The spread of the battery farming of tourists, combined with the widespread use of agrochemicals, is in the process of destroying all dietary diversity.”11 We must avoid the market becoming split “between chemical chow and luxury natural food”. Organic produce should not become an island lost on an ocean of pollution. Especially as this pollution increases in tandem with urbanisation and the car traffic that comes along with it.

How can we live our lives in the middle of a perpetual building site? Growth has become a shared dogma, and so knows no borders.

People are born to be free (and to walk freely), but they live and die as slaves to their cars. “We think we are building cars, when in fact we are building a society,”12 Charbonneau wrote in L’Hommauto. “What good is a car if you never get out of it?” he asked, rhetorically. Drivers have made their cars into gods, to which they are ready to sacrifice everything. They may have started as a means, but now cars are seen as ends in themselves. Westerners invented motorised vehicles so that they could go wherever they wanted, but in the end, they only go where their cars take them, as these machines can only operate within a rigid structure. At a time when Taylorism and Fordism were king, Charbonneau thought it was entirely understandable that assembly line workers might want to step away from the grindstone. The car became a way of getting away from it all as much as a form of transport, allowing victims of the industrial system to satisfy a need to express themselves that their work could not satisfy. In the middle of the 1960s, he observed that a section of the population lived and died in their cars.

Allowing as many people as possible to buy a car, to move around more quickly and go wherever they want, is at first glance aligned with democratic ideals. But the inevitable consequence is that the globe is filled with traffic-clogged roads on the way in and out of cities, and further out, motorways that are often of little use. “Cars negate distance, but they negate the landscape at the same time,” noted the avid walker. “We get in the car to get out of the city, but city car life comes with us.” The herd of “nature-loving” drivers all head to the same places at the same time. Not only do city-dwellers sit in traffic jams on their way to and from holidays and weekends away, but they also spend time in gridlock on their way to work. “It is in machines that we go to serve the machines,” because we work to buy and feed the beast, towards which all our energies are directed. In the techno-industrial society, everyone has two jobs: their own, and that of chauffeur.

According to Charbonneau, the acceleration of scientific and technological progress means we never get far beyond the drawing board. When everything changes all the time, individuals tire themselves out in a perpetual effort to adapt. How can we live our lives in the middle of a perpetual building site? Growth has become a shared dogma, and so knows no borders. Nothing can stop it. Charbonneau does not argue with the necessity of change, but instead opposes the ways in which and the speed at which it occurs. His assessment in an unpublished 1990 text was that: “Change rules over our society more so than any other, both practically and morally, and so history now flows like an unchecked torrent.” The ideology of “progress” that drives industrial civilisation has made change both a reality and a value.

Re-establishing balance

Charbonneau always based his reasoning on personal experience, willing to bet it had universal resonance. He thus took Bordeaux as an example of the changes that occurred between 1950 and 1980. Among France’s largest urban centres, the Gironde city was no better preserved or more significantly altered than its counterparts. Before the Second World War, Charbonneau still used to see cats and dogs wandering freely in front of the central post office. Machines adapted to the rhythm of living creatures, not vice versa. You could cross the street without a second glance. If you had a hankering for the countryside, a quarter of an hour’s cycling would get you to a meadow or a wood.

“The major post-war change was the integration of the countryside into the industrial and urban system, with the effect of transforming it into an extension of the city.”13 Looking at the ravages of urban sprawl and land take, Charbonneau wondered whether the countryside might have changed faster than the cities. As he saw it, the trend towards architecturally bland detached homes was inexorably destroying local architecture and local landscapes. Everywhere, the countryside was being erased, not to turn it into the city, but to impose a feral form of urbanisation that led to “total suburbanisation”.

Looking at the ravages of urban sprawl and land take, Charbonneau wondered whether the countryside might have changed faster than the cities.

His 1980 “Internal critique of the ecologist movement” still feels current, as the following examples show. Moratoriums are needed to impose limits on development, as on the Côte d’Azur, where continued urban sprawl must be prevented. In terms of energy, we must not trade all-nuclear for all-solar, to avoid occupying finite, fragile land. The solution cannot be a miracle technology but must come from a combination of various sources of energy, and most importantly, a reduction in consumption. Since limiting economic growth also means limiting demographic growth, Charbonneau explicitly opposed natalist policies.

We must also resist the tyranny of the market, which drives the unbridled exploitation of the planet and its inhabitants. Having spread over the entire surface of the earth, productivist logic enforces itself just as strongly as does any totalitarian regime. Ecologists must “remove all goods previously considered free or “priceless” from the imperialism of the market and give them back to nature or to private life,” and so turn away from a world in which everything can be bought and sold.

Along the lines suggested by Ernst F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful, which he cites, and the work of Leopold Kohr and Murray Bookchin, of which he seems to have been unaware, Charbonneau argues that ecologists must break up the capitalist economy into small, autarkic, self-managing units, which would mitigate one type of wound inflicted by the globalised economy: the accelerated destruction of nature caused by the transportation of merchandise from one end of the planet to the other.14

Conscious of the seriousness of the diagnosis, Charbonneau offered no miracle cure, but instead invited the patient to slow down, respect their limits, and get their bearings. We must learn to root ourselves in time and space. Shunted around by the job market, workers, employees, managers, teachers, and civil servants are all too weightless to put down roots. Nature moves slowly, and humans, too, need time to evolve gently. Happiness is found in savouring the present moment and not in an endless wait for the hope of a better world to come. Not only do we need to know how to take our time, in order to enjoy the moment, but we also need to work with what already exists and move forward from there, rather than trying to wipe the slate clean and start again from scratch.

This article was first published in French in Esprit, and in English by Eurozine, in collaboration with CAIRN International Edition. It is republished here with permission.

Translation by Cadenza Academic translations

1. Translator’s note: Unless otherwise stated, all translations of cited material are our own. ︎
2. Jacques Ellul and Patrick Chastenet, Jacques Ellul on Politics, Technology and Christianity: Conversations with Patrick Troude-Chastenet, trans. Joan Mendès France (Wipf & Stock, 2005), 56. ︎
3. Bernard Charbonneau, The Green Light: A Self-Critique of the Ecological Movement, trans. Christian Roy (Bloomsbury, 2018), 102. ︎
4. Patrick Troude-Chastenet, ‘Bernard Charbonneau: Génie méconnu ou faux prophète?’ Revue internationale de politique comparée 4, no. 1 (1997): 189–207. ︎
5. Bernard Charbonneau, ‘La révolution quotidienne: La publicité,’ Esprit, April 1935. ︎
6. Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul, ‘Directives pour un manifeste personnaliste,’ in ‘Nous sommes des révolutionnaires malgré nous’: Textes pionniers de l’écologie politique, ed. Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul (Seuil, 2014), 49–82. ︎
7. Bernard Charbonneau, ‘Le sentiment de la nature, force révolutionnaire,’ in ‘Nous sommes des révolutionnaires malgré nous’, ed. Charbonneau and Ellul, 121–192. ︎
8. Bernard Charbonneau, Le Jardin de Babylone (L’Encyclopédie des nuisances, 2002), 12. ︎
9. Bernard Charbonneau, Notre table rase: Essai (Denoël, 1974), 64. ︎
10.  Charbonneau, Le Jardin de Babylone,  10–11. ︎
11. Bernard Charbonneau, Un festin pour Tantale: Nourriture et société industrielle (Sang de la Terre, 1997), 156. ︎
12. Bernard Charbonneau, L’Hommauto (Denoël, 2003), 28. ︎
13. Bernard Charbonneau, Tristes campagnes (L’Échappée,  2023), 93. ︎
14. Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (Blond & Briggs, 1973). See also Leopold Kohr, Small is Beautiful: Ausgewählte Schriften aus dem Gesamtwerk (Deuticke, 1995); and Murray Bookchin, The Murray Bookchin Reader, ed. Janet Biehl (Black Rose Books, 1999). ︎

Miközben a fejlett mesterséges intelligencia-technológiák kifejlesztéséért folyó technokratikus-autoriter verseny teljes gőzzel folytatódik, a Szilícium-völgy szabályozási napirendekre gyakorolt befolyása már vetekszik – sőt, akár meg is haladja – számos államét. A globális szuperhatalmak és a MI-óriások ambíciói között azonban Európának lehetősége nyílik arra, hogy valami jobbat keressen. Interjú a díjnyertes újságírónővel és írónővel, Karen Haoval.

Alessio Giussani: Számos metaforát hoztak fel a mesterséges intelligencia fejlesztésének jelenlegi modelljének leírására – például egy papagáj vagy egy tükör. Miért választotta éppen a birodalom metaforáját?

Karen Hao: Úgy gondolom, ezek a metaforák mind rendkívül hasznosak. A „birodalomra” összpontosítok, mert nem csupán magát a technikai eszközt és azt vizsgálom, mi történik, amikor azt a társadalomban alkalmazzák, hanem a technológia előállítását is, valamint azokat a szereplőket, akik rendkívüli mértékű gazdasági és politikai hatalmat halmoznak fel annak előállításához.

Négy fő okból nevezem ezt a rendszert birodalomnak. Először is, ezek a vállalatok olyan erőforrásokra tartanak igényt, amelyek nem az övék: az egyének adataira, valamint az írók és alkotók munkájára. Másodszor, rendkívüli mértékben kizsákmányolják a munkaerőt, és ez vonatkozik mind azokra a munkavállalókra, akiket a gyártási folyamatban és a technológiák ellátási láncában kizsákmányolnak, mind pedig azokra, akiknek a munkajogait a technológia bevezetése során csorbítják.

A harmadik szempont az információellenőrzés. A birodalmak terjeszkedésének egyik fő jellemzője az a képesség, hogy minden tudástermelést és információt a birodalmi céljaik szűrőjén keresztül szűrjenek, és pontosan ezt teszik a mesterséges intelligencia vállalatok is. Ők ellenőrzik és cenzúrázzák a tudományt azáltal, hogy a legtöbb mesterséges intelligencia-kutató munkáját pénzügyileg támogatják, és olyan információs technológiát építenek ki, amelyet a központi portállá kívánnak tenni, amelyen keresztül mindenki más kapcsolódik a világhoz, beleértve az oktatást is.

Végül mindezt egy civilizációs küldetésbe burkolják. Azt állítják, hogy azért foglalkoznak ezzel a munkával, mert végső soron olyan technológiát akarnak az emberiség rendelkezésére bocsátani, amely egy utópikus állapotba emel minket, és ha a „rosszfiúk” – ami általában Kínát jelenti – előttünk fejlesztik ki, akkor inkább egy disztópikus állapotba süllyedünk. Ez egyfajta vallási narratíva, amely a régi birodalmak körében is gyakori volt.

Az MI-birodalom, ahogyan Ön leírja, nem korlátozódik egy vállalatra; ez egy rendszer, egy logika. Mi áll az OpenAI-ra és annak vezérigazgatója, Sam Altman személyére irányuló figyelme mögött?

Az egyik válasz az, hogy az embereknek szükségük van történetekre, amelyek segítenek konkrét formába önteni azt, ami egyébként elvont ötlet maradna. De az OpenAI azért is különösen érdekes, mert minden olyan fontos döntést hozott, amely megváltoztatta az iparági normákat, és a birodalomépítés irányába terelte azt. Az OpenAI volt az, amelyik úgy döntött, hogy minden áron bővül, nagy nyelvi modellekkel dolgozik, és chatbot-szerű felületet hoz létre számukra. Szinte minden, amit a közvélemény ma a mesterséges intelligenciával társít, először az OpenAI falai között dőlt el.

Ha elmeséljük ezt a történetet, sokkal nyilvánvalóbbá válik, hogy a mesterséges intelligencia nem elkerülhetetlen, mert rájövünk, hogy valódi emberek hozták meg azokat a döntéseket az értékeik, világnézetük, személyes bosszúvágyuk alapján – bármi is volt az, ami valójában meghatározta a mesterséges intelligencia fejlődésének pályáját. Sam Altman ideológiái nem csupán elvont értelemben áthatják a modellt. Gyakran hallani azt a közhelyet, hogy a modellek tükrözik alkotóikat, de én azt akartam megmutatni, hogy ez valójában hogyan történik. A vállalatokról, az emberekről, valamint a gazdasági és ideológiai környezetről van szó, amelynek részesei.

Ahogy ezek a technológiák egyre hatékonyabbá válnak, az alkalmazásuk feletti ellenőrzés megszerzése egzisztenciális kérdéssé válik. Láttuk, hogy a Big Tech meghajolt Trump előtt a második beiktatásán, de azt is látjuk, hogy a mesterséges intelligencia területén működő vállalatok vezérigazgatói egyre inkább szembefordulnak a kormánnyal. Kié lesz végül a végső szó – az államé vagy a magánvállalatoké?

Folyamatban van a harc arról, ki fogja a döntéseket hozni. A Washington és a Szilícium-völgy közötti kapcsolatot kényelmi szövetségnek tekintem, de egy nagyon feszültnek. Két különböző birodalmi modellt képviselnek, mindkettő a saját birodalmi terveivel. Mindkettő terjeszkedni próbál, és szó szerint több területet akar átvenni más országoktól, de a Trump-kormányzat az MI-vállalatokat az állam birodalmi törekvéseinek eszközeiként tekinti. Eközben a Szilícium-völgy a Trump-kormányzatot saját birodalmi törekvéseinek eszközeként tekinti, de valójában nem járnak egy hullámhosszon, mert mindkettő azt akarja, hogy ő legyen a legfőbb hatóság, amely a csúcsra kerül.

Voltak olyan pillanatok, amikor az amerikai kormány bebizonyította, hogy még mindig ő az úr – amikor Trump és Musk összetűztek, Muskot kirúgták. Amikor azonban a Hadügyminisztérium összetűzésbe került az Anthropic-kal, a vállalat bebizonyította, hogy ebben az esetben ő az erősebb fél: Pete Hegseth védelmi miniszter a „nukleáris opciót” vetette fel, azzal fenyegetve, hogy a vállalatot ellátási lánc-kockázatnak nyilvánítja – mint végső eszközt, amellyel az Anthropic-ot engedelmeskedésre kényszerítheti –, de a vállalat még így sem hajlott engedésre. Elég kínos módon a Háborús Minisztérium mélyen függővé vált egy olyan magánszereplőtől, amely nem hajlandó a kormány feltételei szerint együttműködni, és a kormány semmit sem tehet ellene.

Mindkét birodalmi szereplőnek elszámoltathatónak kell lennie, és ez az elszámoltathatóság egyiküktől sem fog származni; a néptől kell származnia. Alulról felfelé építkező, alulról jövő szerveződésből, amelynek virágzását kezdjük látni szerte a világon, beleértve az Egyesült Államokat is. Bármennyire is áthatolhatatlannak tűnik ez a kényelmi szövetség, valójában rendkívül törékeny, és vannak lehetőségek arra, hogy felgyorsítsuk bukását azáltal, hogy nagyobb nyomást gyakorlunk a gyenge pontjaira.

Ahelyett, hogy a mesterséges intelligenciát a jók és a rosszak közötti globális versenynek tekintenénk, inkább azon kellene gondolkodnunk, hogy milyen jövőképünk van a társadalomról.

A mesterséges intelligencia fejlesztésének jelenlegi állása úgy tűnik, mint egy versengő verseny a mélypont felé a rivális vállalatok és a globális szuperhatalmak között. Milyen szerepet játszott a Kínával folytatott geopolitikai verseny abban, hogy a mesterséges intelligencia a jelenlegi nehéz helyzetbe került?

Kína egy olyan kártya, amelyet a Szilícium-völgy már egy évtizede kijátszik, gyakorlatilag azóta, hogy kiutasították Kínából. Ha azonban megvizsgáljuk ennek az érvelésnek a korábbi eredményeit, láthatjuk, hogy a valóságban mindig pont az történt, ami a Szilícium-völgy előrejelzéseivel ellentétes volt.

Azt állították, hogy a szilícium-völgyi vállalatok szabályozásának elmaradása – és Kína exportkorlátozásokon keresztüli szabályozása – révén az amerikai technológia világszerte dominálni fog. Mégis a TikTok a legnépszerűbb közösségi médiaplatform, és a kínai nyílt forráskódú mesterséges intelligencia-modellek egyre népszerűbbek világszerte, az Egyesült Államokban is. Azt is megígérték, hogy a Szilícium-völgy dominanciája liberalizáló hatással lesz a világra, de ez sem valósult meg; hatásuk éppen ellenkezőleg, mélyen illiberalizáló volt. A demokratikus intézmények rendkívüli mértékű eróziója és a demokrácia visszaesésének gyors felgyorsulása volt tapasztalható, amit a Szilícium-völgyi platformok és a mesterséges intelligencia-technológiák is elősegítettek.

Ahelyett, hogy a mesterséges intelligenciát a jók és a rosszak közötti globális versenynek tekintenénk, inkább azon kellene gondolkodnunk, hogy milyen jövőképünk van a társadalomról, milyen mesterséges intelligencia-technológiák támogatnák ezt a jövőképet, és milyen erőforrásokra van szükségünk annak megvalósításához. Nem a Szilícium-völgy által meghatározott versenyben kellene versenyeznünk, hanem azokban az elképzelésekben és értékekben, amelyeket fenn akarunk tartani. És úgy gondolom, Európának itt lehetősége nyílik arra, hogy a világnak egy harmadik utat mutasson, amely eltér az Egyesült Államokétól és Kínáétól, és amely új szabályokat állít fel.

Az Európai Bizottság nemrég elfogadott egy technológiai szuverenitási csomagot, amely része annak az erőfeszítésnek, hogy Európa saját technológiai útját járja. Hogyan fogalmazzuk meg ezt a jövőképet úgy, hogy ne egy megfigyelésen alapuló, oligarchikus üzleti modell európai változatát kapjuk?

Az a vezetőcsillag, amelyet Európának követnie kell, nem a szuverenitás a szuverenitás kedvéért, hanem az a cél, hogy ezt a szuverenitást elérjük. Európa – vagy legalábbis nagy része – a demokrácia egyik utolsó bástyája a világon. Támogatja az emberi jogokat és szabadságokat, és szüksége van a technológiai szuverenitásra, hogy előmozdítsa ezeket az értékeket. Amíg rendkívül függő marad az olyan rendszerektől, amelyeket nagyon autoriter módon fejlesztenek ki, és amelyek az európai társadalmak aláásására törekednek, addig nem tudja fenntartani értékeit.

A szuverenitás mint fogalom hajlamos elmosódni, ha pusztán öncélként kezdjük el értelmezni. Ennek egy cél eléréséhez vezető eszköznek kell lennie.

Milyen koalíciókból, érdekcsoportokból vagy konfliktusok színtereiből kellene kiindulnunk annak érdekében, hogy felépítsük ezt az alternatív jövőképet?

Először is, az MI-irányítást tágabb értelemben kell felfognunk. Például a munkavállalói jogok megerősítése és a civil társadalom védelme is az MI-irányítás részét képezi. A diákoknak, a tanároknak és az egészségügyi dolgozóknak is ott kell ülniük az asztalnál, hogy segítsenek alakítani és megkérdőjelezni, hogyan fejlesztik és alkalmazzák a mesterséges intelligenciát a társadalomban. Az oktatás kulcsfontosságú, mind szektorként és olyan koalícióként, amelyet be kell vonnunk, mind pedig a mesterséges intelligenciával kapcsolatos társadalmi felvilágosítás szempontjából.

Egy másik fontos szempont a mesterséges intelligencia kutatóinak és vállalkozóinak finanszírozása, hogy kiderítsék a fejlesztésük technikai részleteit és az alkalmazás módját. De nem adhatunk nekik egyszerűen pénzt anélkül, hogy a társadalom többi részének is szót adnánk; ellenkező esetben csak megismételjük azokat a problémákat, amelyekkel az Egyesült Államokban szembesülünk, ahol lényegében a technokraták vagy a technokonzervatívok hoznak döntéseket.

Nem a nulláról indulunk. Már rengeteg munkát végeztek annak érdekében, hogy meghatározzák azokat a közös célokat, amelyek felé a társadalomnak törekednie kell. Például a fenntartható fejlődési célokra gondolok. Ez kiindulópont lehet annak kitalálásához, hogyan finanszírozzuk a mesterséges intelligencia terén történő innovációt.

A jelenlegi mesterséges intelligencia-technológiákkal kapcsolatos narratívák rendkívül polarizáltak. Az egyik oldalon vannak azok, akik szerint ezekben a technológiákban nincs semmi különösebben új, és hogy a buborék hamarosan kipukkad. A másik oldalon pedig azok állnak, akik úgy vélik, hogy a mesterséges intelligencia átalakítja az életünket, forradalmasítja az ellátási láncokat, és mindannyiunkat feleslegessé tesz. Mit gondol ezekről a különböző álláspontokról?

Igaz, sokan hajlamosak túlzottan felnagyítani az előnyöket anélkül, hogy figyelembe vennék a technológiák költségeit, vagy éppen a költségeket emelik ki túlzottan, anélkül, hogy látnák az előnyöket. De szerintem elég nagy azok aránya, akik egyetértenek abban, hogy szeretnénk élvezni a mesterséges intelligencia előnyeit, de nem a méltóságteljes életvitelünk árán – amelyhez hozzátartozik a jó egészségügyi ellátás, a gazdasági lehetőségek, az egészséges környezet és a virágzó bolygó. Ez a legkiegyensúlyozottabb megközelítés.

A mesterséges intelligencia (MI) sokféle technológia gyűjtőneve, ezért alaposan át kell gondolnunk, melyekbe fektessünk be, és mely új technológiákat szeretnénk kifejleszteni, mert mindegyik más-más kompromisszumokkal jár; ezek közül néhány összhangban áll azzal a jövővel, amelyet építeni szeretnénk, mások viszont nem. Bölcsen kell választanunk.

A mesterséges intelligencia (MI) számos különböző technológiát jelöl, ezért alaposan át kell gondolnunk, melyekbe fektetünk be, és mely új technológiákat szeretnénk kifejleszteni.

Milyen a saját viszonya a meglévő MI-eszközökhöz?

Három fő okból nem használom őket. Először is az etikai álláspontom miatt. Másodszor a magánélet védelmével kapcsolatos álláspontom miatt: ezeket a vállalatokat vizsgálom, és ezek végső soron a valaha feltalált leghatékonyabb megfigyelési technológiák. Harmadszor, ezek az eszközök nem igazán hasznosak ahhoz a speciális készségkészlethez, amelyre a munkám elvégzéséhez szükségem van.

Nem azt mondom, hogy mindenkinek ugyanezt kellene tennie. Sok emberrel beszéltem, akik egyértelműen profitálnak ezekből az eszközökből, vagy akiknek a szakmai szerepük részeként kötelező azok használata. Inkább az a megoldás a jelenlegi problémára, ha ugyanazt tesszük, amit a múltban más iparágakkal, például a divatiparral is tettünk. Amikor rájöttünk, hogy ruháink nagy részét valóban szörnyű körülmények között gyártják, nem egyszerűen csak megszabadultunk a ruháktól. Számos fogyasztói és munkavállalói szerveződés, kormányzati szabályozás és általános közvélemény-visszhang kellett ahhoz, hogy az iparágot kordába szorítsák. Természetesen a divatipar még mindig messze nem tökéletes, de legalább ma már vannak alternatívák, és a fogyasztók a pénztárcájukkal szavazhatnak arról, hogy milyen ellátási láncot és vállalati gyakorlatokat támogatnak.

Ugyanezt kell tennünk a mesterséges intelligenciával is. Jelenleg nincs elég alternatíva a felhasználók számára, és ahhoz, hogy ez megváltozzon, több munkavállalói szerveződésre és nagyobb nyilvános ellenállásra van szükség. Akik tudnak tartózkodni ezeknek a technológiáknak a használatától, azoknak feltétlenül bojkottálniuk kell őket, a kormányoknak pedig be kell avatkozniuk, hogy segítsenek új piacokat teremteni az alternatívák számára.

A fogyasztóknak fontos befolyásuk van, de ez nem az egyetlen. Emberként, egyénként munkavállalói, oktatói és polgári szerepet is betöltünk, és el kell gondolkodnunk azon, hogyan használhatjuk fel ezeket a szerepeket a mesterséges intelligencia fejlesztésével kapcsolatban annak javítása érdekében.

Enquanto iniciativas democráticas lideradas por cidadãos, as comunidades de energia desempenham um papel importante nos esforços em acelerar a transição da Europa para as energias renováveis. No entanto, por detrás da sua imagem progressista, persistem desigualdades familiares: as mulheres e as FLINTA continuam amplamente ausentes da adesão e da tomada de decisões. Se estes projetos populares de base têm como objetivo reformular não só a forma como a energia é produzida, mas também quem detém o poder, a questão do género não pode ser tratada como secundária.

As comunidades de energia são frequentemente consideradas um dos desenvolvimentos mais promissores ligados à transição energética — e por boas razões. A REScoop.eu, a federação europeia de comunidades de energia, descreve-as como uma «forma de organizar cidadãos que pretendem cooperar juntos numa atividade relacionada com o setor energético, baseada numa participação e governança abertas e democráticas, de modo a que a atividade possa prestar serviços ou outros benefícios aos membros ou à comunidade local». Isto abrange uma vasta gama de organizações e iniciativas, com dimensões e formas de produzir energia muito diferentes, desde a solar e hídrica à eólica ou biomassa. Em comum têm a produção de energia descentralizada e autogerida, a aposta nas renováveis e — infelizmente — uma persistente sub-representação das mulheres. Estudos mostram que mais de 70 por cento dos membros de comunidades de energia elétrica e mais de 83 por cento dos seus conselhos de administração são do sexo masculino.

Pode parecer picuinhas discutir a dinâmica de género no contexto da transição energética em geral, e ainda mais no microcosmos das comunidades de energia, que estão ainda a estabelecer-se na maioria dos Estados-membros da UE. No entanto, o género continua a ser uma lente útil para descrever a experiência de mais de metade da população e para analisar fenómenos políticos, incluindo a política energética.

Nas comunidades de energia, há uma persistente sub-representação das mulheres. Estudos mostram que mais de 70% dos membros e mais de 83% dos conselhos de administração são do sexo masculino.

Além disso, as comunidades de energia são laboratórios interessantes, pois abordam a transição energética a partir das bases, em proximidade com a vida quotidiana das pessoas. As estruturas e dinâmicas presentes nestes contextos podem simultaneamente refletir e moldar a direção da mudança.

Uma transição política
Os nossos sistemas energéticos atuais têm um impacto mais negativo nas mulheres do que nos homens. Isso começa com a extração de combustíveis fósseis, que coloca as mulheres indígenas e as pessoas two-spirit num risco acrescido de violência (incluindo sexual). Estes grupos também sofrem mais com os efeitos imediatos do consumo de combustíveis fósseis, como na poluição derivada de cozinhar. Os efeitos a longo prazo das alterações climáticas também mostram ter um viés de género: as mulheres enfrentam mais riscos para a saúde, estão em maior risco durante as catástrofes climáticas, e por aí fora.

O setor energético emprega menos mulheres e paga-lhes menos, agravando também a sua pobreza (energética). Do mesmo modo, a governança energética tem sido dominada por homens no passado, tanto a nível nacional como europeu. No fundo, os sistemas energéticos atuais não funcionam para as mulheres em imensos aspetos e as comunidades de energia ainda não se libertaram desta dinâmica. Por isso, o género precisa de ser tido em conta para a justiça energética, a par das experiências interseccionais de desigualdade e opressão, que incluem também a classe, a sexualidade, a etnia e a idade. No entanto, como demonstrou a investigadora Barbara Nicoloso, a vertente política da transição energética não tem recebido a devida atenção.

Os sistemas energéticos atuais não funcionam para as mulheres em imensos aspetos e as comunidades de energia ainda não se libertaram desta dinâmica.

A política energética é sensível à política em geral e aos interesses políticos instalados. A reação contra o Pacto Ecológico Europeu (o Green Deal) visa abrandar a transição energética — mesmo quando os estudos refutam, uma e outra vez, a ideia de que os eleitores se opõem às medidas climáticas. Ao mesmo tempo, os riscos geopolíticos ligados à dependência dos combustíveis fósseis ficaram bem visíveis desde a invasão da Ucrânia, com os elevados preços da energia a agravar a pobreza energética na Europa. Nos anos que se seguiram à invasão, a UE conseguiu diversificar o seu fornecimento de energia (ainda que por vezes com contrapartidas dolorosas), mas as renováveis estão a ser difamadas pela extrema-direita. Na Alemanha, por exemplo, a Alternativa para a Alemanha (AfD) tem criticado frequentemente a energia eólica e defendido a retoma das importações baratas de combustíveis fósseis vindas da Rússia.

A política energética reflete as estruturas e as prioridades das sociedades em que é criada. Isto significa que a sub-representação das mulheres num nicho de prosumidores de energia ativos não é uma coincidência, mas um produto da política. É um sinal de alerta de que a transição energética, se for tratada como forma de sair de um sistema e entrar num novo, mesmo por defensores das renováveis, vai arrastar consigo pontos cegos contraproducentes e injustos.

Equilibrar o terreno

As comunidades de energia representam um microcosmos das questões mais amplas com que progressistas e Verdes se debatem em toda a Europa. Pode a transição energética ser verdadeiramente participativa? Como pode ser acelerada e o seu alcance alargado? As dinâmicas sociais e políticas são, pelo menos, tão importantes quanto as considerações técnicas.

A sub-representação das mulheres num nicho das comunidades de energia não é uma coincidência. É um produto da política.

Dado que as comunidades de energia são, na maioria das vezes, fundadas e mantidas vivas apenas por voluntários, ter mais membros significa maior envolvimento, mais recursos e, em última análise, mais dinamismo. Embora as comunidades de energia tenham surgido de um movimento ambicioso para a transição energética, atualmente, ficam tantas vezes limitadas a um grupo homogéneo de homens altamente qualificados e com rendimentos elevados.

Se as comunidades de energia conseguirem aumentar o número de mulheres entre os seus membros, a transição energética descentralizada ganha velocidade. O que pode ser feito para criar um ciclo positivo entre a participação das mulheres nas comunidades de energia, a igualdade de género e a transição energética?

O caso das comunidades de energia alemãs é particularmente interessante porque a Alemanha é o país com mais comunidades de energia na UE e tem uma longa história de ativismo de base e turbulência política relacionados com a transição energética.

Segundo Lara Track, gestora de projetos na Netzwerk Energiewende Jetzt e.V., uma organização de apoio às comunidades de energia, é impossível ignorar a ligação entre a luta pela igualdade de género e a transição energética, mesmo que esta tenha sido negligenciada durante demasiado tempo.

Se as comunidades de energia conseguirem aumentar o número de mulheres entre os seus membros, a transição energética descentralizada ganha velocidade.

As mulheres, lésbicas, pessoas intersexo, não-binárias, trans e agénero (por vezes designadas em alemão pelo acrónimo FLINTA) estão muito menos representadas nas comunidades de energia, mas também na transição energética como um todo. Lara Track, que trabalhou extensivamente sobre o papel das FLINTA na transição energética, afirma que é essencial aumentar a sua Teilhabe, o seu «ter um papel», que é mais do que apenas participação (Teilnahme).

Centrar apenas na participação como veículo para a igualdade de género e a representação tem-se revelado vulnerável ao tokenismo e à simplificação excessiva. Em contrapartida, ter um papel (através da liderança de um projeto, fazendo parte de uma administração ou simplesmente integrando uma comunidade) significa ter voz e, em última análise, poder. Este tipo de participação mais forte costuma ser mais acessível para pessoas abastadas, proprietários de habitação e homens cisgénero, pois têm mais oportunidades de participar, explica Track. Quem quiser colocar o género nas comunidades de energia tem de nadar contra a maré na sua luta por representação, inclusão e poder. Segundo Track, embora o género seja um tema importante, as comunidades de energia podem acabar por dar prioridade a outras áreas e não conseguir criar estruturas de participação.

Ter um papel significa ter voz e, em última análise, poder.

Kiara Groneweg, que trabalha na área da energia na Women Engage for a Common Future (uma rede sem fins lucrativos dedicada à ligação género-clima), concorda com Track que uma participação e representação meramente simbólicas arriscam reforçar o status quo em vez de trazerem uma mudança transformadora e maior igualdade.

A título de exemplo, Groneweg menciona Katherina Reiche, atual ministra da energia alemã e ex-CEO de uma subsidiária do gigante energético E.ON, como exemplo de mulheres que usam as suas posições de poder para impedir mudanças estruturais. Reiche propôs restrições à expansão das renováveis, como exigir que estas suportem os custos de extensão da rede e limitar a compensação pela injeção de eletricidade na rede. O ex-secretário de Estado Verde Sven Giegold criticou estas propostas como uma tentativa de travar a produção renovável descentralizada.

Quem quiser colocar o género nas comunidades de energia tem de nadar contra a maré na sua luta por representação, inclusão e poder.

Ainda assim, Groneweg reconhece que, no que diz respeito à representação nas comunidades de energia, «as mulheres atraem mulheres e as FLINTA atraem FLINTA». E acrescenta: «Se tivermos um conselho de administração masculino com um tempo de palavra muito elevado, algumas FLINTA simplesmente não vão querer entrar e participar nas discussões, porque a estrutura não se adequa logo à partida.» A atração que acompanha o aumento da representação é crucial para abrir as estruturas dominadas por homens. Como refere Track, «as pessoas gostam de trabalhar com pessoas com quem conseguem sentir uma ligação com relativa facilidade.»

No entanto, as desigualdades socioeconómicas constituem um obstáculo ao aumento da representação, afirma Groneweg. Para ela, o debate sobre uma transição energética socialmente justa precisa também de ser lúcido quanto ao acesso desigual ao capital, à habitação e à propriedade. Este acesso é limitado na Alemanha, onde mais de metade da população vive em habitações arrendadas e uma em cada cinco pessoas está em risco de pobreza ou exclusão social — valor que duplica nos agregados familiares monoparentais.

Estes números têm uma forte dimensão de género. As mulheres representam a grande maioria (85 por cento) dos agregados monoparentais, ganham 16 por cento menos e têm pensões em média muito mais baixas do que os homens.

Com 75 por cento do parque habitacional europeu classificado como energeticamente ineficiente, a transição no aquecimento é o ponto mais vulnerável da transição energética. Groneweg sublinhou que, no aquecimento, as soluções individuais são praticamente insuficientes, sobretudo para os 53 por cento de pessoas na Alemanha que alugam habitação. Uma vez que as renovações e a adaptação com bombas de calor têm sido politicamente inflamadas na Alemanha, estas grandes soluções estruturais ficam por resolver, deixando as populações a compensar sozinhas os elevados custos de energia.

Uma mentalidade competitiva

Quando Marina Braun — engenheira, fundadora e membro do conselho de administração de várias comunidades de energia — decidiu envolver-se no setor, pensou no facto de ser a primeira mulher a aderir a uma comunidade de energia inteiramente masculina. Conhecia até alguns dos homens na administração, o que facilitou. No entanto, acabou por dedicar os seus esforços a uma comunidade de energia mais jovem e diversa.

«Apercebi-me de que a motivação era, de alguma forma, completamente diferente», recorda. «Havia mulheres envolvidas também. Tive um pressentimento de que me sentiria mais confortável do que na outra comunidade de energia porque estavam ativamente à procura de mulheres. Pensei que talvez não houvesse aquela ‘mentalidade de cotoveladas’ — e bem, isso foi um fator decisivo para mim.»

A representação não é uma cura milagrosa para a igualdade de género.

Kerstin Lopau, engenheira e cofundadora da SoLocal Energy, teve uma experiência negativa em comunidades de energia dominadas por homens, onde se deparou com uma falta de generosidade conversacional e uma mentalidade competitiva — a tal mentalidade de cotoveladas também mencionada por Braun. Na sua experiência, uma cultura de comunicação mais agradável conduz também a uma maior produtividade e a uma abordagem cooperativa na resolução de problemas.

Tal como Track e Groneweg, Lopau acredita que a representação não é uma cura milagrosa para a igualdade de género. Por exemplo, fazer parte do conselho de administração de uma empresa — uma estrutura tantas vezes muito hierárquica e conformista — pode levar as mulheres a seguir ideais masculinos e a perder solidariedade com outras mulheres. Nas comunidades de energia, porém, o panorama é um pouco diferente, segundo Lopau: as direções tendem a ser mais democráticas, com vários mecanismos para garantir o controlo e a transparência, o que evita o afastamento e a perda de solidariedade.

Cultivar o terreno
As comunidades de energia alemãs são frequentemente Genossenschaften (cooperativas) que englobam uma ética, um estatuto jurídico e uma estrutura específicos. Estas organizações visam ajudar os seus membros a prosseguir os seus próprios objetivos económicos, sociais ou culturais através de operações conjuntas. Seguem tradicionalmente os princípios de entreajuda, autorresponsabilidade e autogestão.

No seu trabalho, Track observou que as comunidades de energia podem desencadear conversas em torno de novas formas sustentáveis de criar e reter valor. As comunidades de energia são alavancas para as pessoas beneficiarem localmente da transição energética, em especial as que não beneficiam atualmente, observa. No setor da energia, isto é crucial. Demonstrou-se que os projetos de energia comunitária geram entre duas a oito vezes mais receitas locais do que se o projeto fosse realizado por um agente externo. Na Alemanha, onde grande parte da eletricidade produzida no leste do país flui para oeste, agravando os desequilíbrios existentes, este aspeto local tem um potencial imenso.

O debate sobre uma transição energética socialmente justa precisa também de ser lúcido quanto ao acesso desigual ao capital, à habitação e à propriedade.

Track diz que é surpreendente que mais municípios não recorram às comunidades de energia para combater o fenómeno «not in my backyard» (NIMBY) e construir uma democracia energética local. Segundo Groneweg, porém, dado o tempo e o esforço voluntário necessários para criar comunidades de energia (sobretudo num país como a Alemanha, sobrecarregado por enormes obstáculos burocráticos), as comunidades de energia não devem ser as únicas responsáveis por eliminar barreiras estruturais e resolver problemas políticos mais amplos como a pobreza energética.

Em vez disso, o movimento das comunidades de energia poderia unir forças com outros movimentos sociais, como as comunidades feministas e climáticas. «Espero um movimento energético feminista que lute para crescer os sistemas de energia descentralizados. Teríamos então mais pessoas a envolver-se. Isso significaria que, numa comunidade de energia que talvez tenha agora cerca de 20 voluntários, de repente 200 estão envolvidos, e cresce de cidade em cidade, ou de aldeia em aldeia», diz Groneweg.

As comunidades de energia são alavancas para as pessoas beneficiarem localmente da transição energética, em especial as que não beneficiam atualmente.

Para Lopau, é um desenvolvimento positivo que os painéis solares se tenham tornado um produto de massa, retirando a geração de energia do domínio dos geeks da tecnologia e trazendo-a para o mundo familiar do supermercado local. Os pequenos módulos fotovoltaicos tornam muito acessível para os inquilinos criar o seu próprio sistema solar nas varandas. Para quem consome pouco ou está em situação de pobreza energética, as poupanças geradas por um módulo solar numa varanda são relativamente maiores do que para quem consome muito.

As renováveis permitem a produção local de energia e são a forma mais democrática e acessível de fornecer energia até à data. No entanto, estas fontes de energia ainda são fortemente influenciadas pelos sistemas energéticos anteriores e pelas suas dinâmicas de género, observa Lopau. Ela vê as renováveis como um terreno fértil que agora precisa de cultivo para alcançar o seu potencial, nomeadamente através da inclusão de pessoas FLINTA nas comunidades de energia. No entanto, persistem pequenos e grandes obstáculos que as comunidades de energia têm de superar para equilibrar a sua participação.

«As comunidades de energia não existem num vazio»

Os primeiros obstáculos que os potenciais novos membros de uma comunidade de energia enfrentam são os custos iniciais e recorrentes associados à adesão. As comunidades de energia podem antecipar-se a isso oferecendo modelos de preços solidários.

O movimento das comunidades de energia pode unir forças com outros movimentos sociais, como as comunidades feministas e climáticas.

Lopau, que tem estado ativa na democratização dos sistemas solares de varanda, reconhece que as renováveis muitas vezes não são uma prioridade para quem enfrenta a pobreza (energética) e o peso mental e o stress a ela associados. Afirma que as comunidades de energia devem depender menos das motivações internas das pessoas com consciência ambiental. Para que isto se torne uma realidade, os potenciais utilizadores devem ser procurados de forma proativa e apoiados.

Mas as barreiras financeiras não são o único obstáculo à participação. Uma vez que as comunidades de energia dependem da eficácia individual e coletiva, as pessoas que não tenham autoconfiança ou experiência na sociedade civil ou em iniciativas coletivas locais, como associações desportivas, podem enfrentar barreiras mentais e subestimar-se a si próprias e às suas capacidades. Para Braun, é importante lembrar às pessoas que as comunidades de energia são uma iniciativa coletiva. Os membros trabalharão sempre com outros; ninguém ficará para trás, e seguem sempre um princípio de trabalho a 4 ou 6 mãos, afirma.

Para antecipar os obstáculos financeiros à adesão, as comunidades de energia podem oferecer modelos de preços solidários.

Os estereótipos de género também contribuem para a sub-representação das mulheres. Braun, que estudou engenharia, sugere que a disparidade de género nas áreas STEM também tem que ver com os nomes dos programas de licenciatura e a ênfase nos aspetos técnicos. Termos como tecnologia energética ou tecnologia renovável tendem a colocar em primeiro plano os elementos técnicos tradicionalmente associados à masculinidade, ocultando as questões jurídicas, organizacionais e sociais ligadas às renováveis.

Braun sublinha que os estereótipos de género podem ser desafiados. «Este é um tema que qualquer pessoa pode aprender e compreender. Basta dedicar-lhe tempo, tal como é preciso tempo para aprender a tricotar, a pintar e qualquer outra competência que se queira desenvolver.»

A disparidade de género nas áreas STEM também tem que ver com os nomes dos programas de licenciatura e a ênfase nos aspetos técnicos.

No entanto, a escassez de tempo também afeta desproporcionalmente as mulheres. Na Alemanha, as mulheres passam 44,3 por cento mais tempo em trabalho de cuidados do que os homens, constituindo um segundo turno não remunerado de 30 horas por semana. Estima-se que este trabalho equivale a 826 mil milhões de euros por ano não remunerados, sendo a condição prévia de todo o trabalho remunerado. Sem dar e receber cuidados, como ensinar as crianças a falar, a resolver conflitos ou a construir relações sociais, outras atividades económicas simplesmente não seriam possíveis. Quando os governos pressionam para o alargamento da semana de trabalho a fim de aumentar a produção económica, arriscam reforçar a disparidade de cuidados entre géneros. Reduzem também o tempo disponível para o envolvimento e a participação democráticos.

Estas são questões mais amplas que inevitavelmente afetam as comunidades de energia, que dependem maioritariamente do trabalho voluntário. Como refere Track: «As comunidades de energia não existem num vazio. E tudo o que fazemos estruturalmente para promover a igualdade de género vai beneficiar a igualdade de género dentro das comunidades de energia.»

As competências que importam

Uma das estratégias que os organizadores das comunidades de energia seguem para atrair pessoas FLINTA é destacar que são necessárias competências diversas. As competências em comunicação, administração, direito ou finanças são essenciais para construir a organização antes de qualquer ventoinha eólica ou campo de painéis solares ser aprovado.

Braun explica que, especialmente no início, é essencial ter pessoas a bordo que saibam como construir uma organização — de forma prática e social. «As mulheres são simplesmente muito boas a construir organizações estruturalmente, em gestão de projetos, são muito ponderadas, muito empáticas — e é isso que é essencial para uma comunidade de energia.» Chegar às pessoas, convencê-las e integrá-las está ligado a um conjunto de competências emocionais e sociais (que são, de facto, competências, e não qualidades inatas) que as mulheres e as pessoas FLINTA frequentemente têm.

As competências em comunicação, administração, direito ou finanças são essenciais para construir a organização antes de qualquer ventoinha eólica ou campo de painéis solares ser aprovado.

Os investigadores demonstraram provas sólidas dos benefícios de trabalhar em equipas mais diversas. Um exemplo, mencionado por Braun, é a maior aversão ao risco. Na sua experiência, enquanto os homens tendem a assumir mais riscos e a adiar a abordagem de cenários pessimistas, uma maior interação entre géneros nas discussões equilibra estas tendências, conduzindo, por exemplo, a uma avaliação de risco mais sólida sobre no que investir.

Para Lopau, procurar ativamente uma adesão mais diversa pode também ter efeitos dominó importantes, como abrir novas perspetivas e oportunidades para fazer crescer a comunidade, e tornar o espaço mais acolhedor para todos — incluindo potenciais novos membros.

Track menciona o exemplo de uma comunidade de energia liderada por mulheres com que trabalhou: «Acho interessante que, quando há duas presidentes, se pense em programas de apoio à infância.» E acrescenta: «Não são as únicas, mas nem toda a gente o faz.»

Com vista à transição energética, que por vezes luta para ter o apoio das comunidades e fazer face ao fenómeno NIMBY, torna-se evidente que as competências sociais e organizacionais — tradicionalmente associadas a género e desvalorizadas — são as que determinam o impacto de uma comunidade de energia. Embora do exterior possa parecer que a falta de competências tecnológicas torna a participação nas comunidades de energia sem sentido, na verdade, são as competências sociais e organizacionais que podem fazer crescer e escalar o movimento.

«Não ouças os homens»

Kerstin Lopau quer combater a sub-representação das mulheres nas comunidades de energia pela raiz e fazer as coisas de forma radicalmente diferente. Em anos anteriores, organizou uma escola de verão para jovens aprenderem a instalar painéis solares. Depois de receber feedback de que algumas pessoas FLINTA não se inscreveram porque não se sentiam seguras, Lopau pôs mãos à obra. Desde então, ela e os seus colegas da SoLocal Energy têm organizado campos solares concebidos especificamente para FLINTA. A sua abordagem é estar atenta às lacunas, «tentar sempre olhar atentamente para o que as pessoas precisam. Sabemos pela nossa própria experiência no terreno o que parece estranho, por isso tentamos perceber o que poderia ser melhor.»

Estes campos solares pretendem também ser uma rampa de lançamento para o emprego futuro daqueles que gostariam de seguir este caminho profissionalmente. Lopau tem sido estratégica na construção de relações com o setor local de mão-de-obra especializada no Norte de Hesse. Contou com a sua experiência e conhecimento, mesmo quando tal não era estritamente necessário. Estas colaborações levaram a alguns contactos muito úteis. Ela recorda que os profissionais «viram no local, ‘ok, elas sabem mesmo o que estão a fazer, e são competentes — e não são tão más como pensávamos. Talvez possamos recrutar alguns estagiários e trabalhadores aqui.’ Por isso foi uma situação em que todos saíram a ganhar.»

Um pilar central deste campo de verão é o networking, já que a construção de relações entre estes futuros profissionais de energia durante o campo tem sido valiosa. Desenvolve a literacia energética e a confiança das participantes, permitindo-lhes aparecer de forma diferente, mais empoderada, nas suas comunidades de energia ou em futuros empregos. Lopau partilha que uma antiga participante do campo de verão lhe enviou um e-mail com uma questão técnica. «Disse que era assim que se tinha de fazer, mas os homens aqui dizem que não é preciso fazê-lo assim», escreveu a participante. Lopau respondeu: «Não, não ouças os homens. Lembraste-te corretamente.»

Este artigo foi inspirado pelo trabalho de Barbara Nicoloso, cujo ensaio “Gender Power: The energy transition through a gender lens” e o policy brief “Gender at the Heart of the EU Energy Transition: Key learnings from the French case” foram anteriormente publicados pela Green European Foundation.

O que distingue os humanos da inteligência artificial? A autora alemã Nina George vê a resposta na capacidade de criar aquilo que até então não existia. No entanto, à medida que o alcance da IA se expande para cantos cada vez mais distantes das nossas vidas – desde o conteúdo que consumimos até à forma como falamos –, arriscamo-nos a perder a nossa liberdade e criatividade.

Mais de três anos após o seu lançamento no mercado, em novembro de 2022, o ChatGPT, a robótica geradora de texto criada pela OpenAI na sagrada Silicon Valley, continua a ser adorado como se fosse o «Pancriador» (como o autor e filósofo da tecnologia Stanisław Lem chamou o «construtor racional do mundo» na sua obra de 1964, Summa Technologiae).

Segundo um estudo da própria OpenAI, 800 milhões de utilizadores, predominantemente jovens entre os 18 e os 25 anos, submetem uma média de 18 mil milhões de pedidos por semana ao seu chatbot. Recorrem ao ChatGPT para trabalhos de casa, candidaturas a emprego, slogans de marketing, e-mails, newsletters, excertos de propaganda para bots das redes sociais, para produtos que se assemelham a livros, críticas ou traduções; para cartas de amor à la Cyrano de Bergerac versão ciborgue, respostas automáticas ao cliente, resumos; e conselhos de relacionamento ou de vida. Claro que o ChatGPT é apenas um entre muitos chatbots – existem muito mais de 1000 grandes modelos de linguagem, e as suas aplicações estão disponíveis em todo o mundo.

O número de pedidos oscila no início e no fim do semestre e das férias escolares. Segundo um inquérito da HEPI e da Kortext no Reino Unido, a proporção de estudantes que usam ferramentas de IA generativa como o ChatGPT para trabalhos avaliados saltou de 53 por cento em 2024 para 88 por cento em 2025. Tal como a escrita, também a leitura está em declínio. Docentes universitários na Europa e do outro lado do Atlântico relatam que um número crescente de estudantes não está habituado a ler e considera mental, emocional e fisicamente exaustivo ler textos mais longos do que um poema.

Embora fosse fácil culpar estes desenvolvimentos na OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic e os restantes suspeitos do costume do colonialismo digital norte-americano, a IA apenas acelerou uma tendência que já era visível, inclusive na Europa. O poder computacional e a estatística baseada em dados, frequentemente apresentados como «inteligência artificial», são um espelho amplificador de condições pré-existentes desoladoras.

Tal como a escrita, também a leitura está em declínio. Docentes universitários na Europa e do outro lado do Atlântico relatam que um número crescente de estudantes não está habituado a ler e considera mental, emocional e fisicamente exaustivo ler textos mais longos do que um poema.

Um admirável mundo velho

As tentativas, desde os anos 1960, de replicar as vias neuronais do cérebro humano através de estatística baseada em dados produziram aquilo a que chamamos «IA fraca». A IA fraca só consegue concentrar-se numa única tarefa – ao contrário dos humanos, que conseguem processar 11 milhões de impressões sensoriais por segundo e filtrar as 40 mais importantes para reações imediatas. Ao conduzir um automóvel, nós pensamos, mudamos de mudança, viramos o volante, reagimos aos sinais vermelhos e mantemos o olhar na criança no banco de trás que está a enfiar um chocalho no nariz.

O ChatGPT, o Gemini, o LlaMA, o Microsoft Copilot e semelhantes só conseguem conduzir sempre em frente ou reconhecer o sinal vermelho. Além disso, não compreendem nem o significado nem o contexto daquilo que misturam, porque todas as letras, palavras, frases, contextos e informações são convertidos em fórmulas algorítmicas. A linguagem humana é convertida em matemática de máquina, e a matemática é cuspida de volta como comunicação simulada.

Numa era de policrises complexas, da ascensão da extrema-direita e de uma inundação de bots de propaganda nas redes sociais, a comunicação automatizada funciona como acelerador de futuras ditaduras linguísticas.

No entanto, este resultado é rigorosamente pré-censurado: os chatbots de IA estão programados para evitar uma lista crescente de termos proibidos e temas sensíveis, através de um «controlo de conteúdo» definido de fábrica. Esta lista inclui palavrões e termos sexualmente explícitos, mas também adjetivos incomuns e assuntos politicamente sensíveis (e, com o atual governo dos EUA, a lista é cada vez mais longa). O resultado é, na melhor das hipóteses, uma linguagem medíocre e conservadora, desprovida do elemento humano.

Os chatbots de IA estão programados para evitar uma lista crescente de termos proibidos e temas sensíveis, através de um «controlo de conteúdo» definido de fábrica. O resultado é, na melhor das hipóteses, uma linguagem medíocre e conservadora, desprovida do elemento humano.

Esta linguagem está a mudar não só a comunicação humana escrita, mas também a oral. Investigadores do Instituto Max Planck para o Desenvolvimento Humano analisaram mais de 770.000 podcasts e vídeos e concluíram que estamos a começar a falar no estilo do ChatGPT. Esta erosão da diversidade linguística e cultural aumenta consideravelmente o perigo de manipulação de opinião. Numa era de policrises complexas, da ascensão da extrema-direita e de uma inundação de bots de propaganda nas redes sociais, a comunicação automatizada funciona como acelerador de futuras ditaduras (linguísticas).

Uma análise a mais de 770.000 podcasts e vídeos conclui que estamos a começar a falar no estilo do ChatGPT. Esta erosão da diversidade linguística e cultural aumenta o perigo de manipulação de opinião.

Exploradores do tempo, da cultura e do conhecimento
Mas este não é o único problema com o entusiasmo em torno da IA. A base textual sobre a qual, por exemplo, o GPT-3 foi desenvolvido, consiste em 45 terabytes de material que a OpenAI muito provavelmente pilhou ilegalmente ao longo dos anos. Trezentos milhões de páginas de texto extraídas de sites privados, arquivos de meios de comunicação, fóruns do Reddit, avaliações da Amazon, redes sociais, entradas da Wikipédia. E também sete milhões de livros protegidos por direitos de autor e 81 milhões de textos científicos.

Equipas de investigação como a holandesa AI Safety Camp ou a dinamarquesa Rights Alliance provaram que as bases para grandes modelos de linguagem, como o Llama da Meta, foram construídas a partir de livros e coleções como a Books3, armazenadas ilegalmente em bibliotecas paralelas como a Library Genesis (LibGen), a Z-Library (Bok), a Sci-Hub e a Bibliotik – sites de pirataria.

O número de processos judiciais contra empresas de IA pela violação massiva de direitos de autor cresce todas as semanas nos EUA. Na Europa, as ações coletivas são difíceis de mover e financeiramente inviáveis para autores individuais.

O número de processos judiciais contra esta violação massiva de direitos de autor cresce todas as semanas. Em novembro de 2025, havia 75 processos contra a OpenAI, a Microsoft, a Meta e a Alphabet (empresa-mãe da Google). Os mais conhecidos são o do The New York Times contra a OpenAI e a Microsoft, e a ação coletiva movida pela Guilda dos Autores dos EUA (a maior organização profissional de escritores nos EUA) e 18 autores individuais (incluindo George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen e John Grisham) contra a OpenAI. Outro processo, movido por três autores individuais, o caso Bartz v. Anthropic, resultou num acordo de 1,5 mil milhões de dólares. Na Europa, as ações coletivas são difíceis de mover e financeiramente inviáveis para autores individuais. Mesmo que os juízes norte-americanos decidam contra a pilhagem feita pela IA, isso não fará justiça aos autores europeus.

Danos de mercado pelo resultado da IA

O linguista Noam Chomsky chamou ao ChatGPT um «plagiador de alta tecnologia» que copia de livros amostrados ilegalmente para produzir texto que reflete o estilo dos autores originais. Apesar deste roubo, os resultados são considerados «domínio público» e podem ser reutilizados por qualquer pessoa. Mas isto é um problema colateral – o dano real é que produtos de IA semelhantes prejudiquem os mercados precisamente das pessoas cujas obras foram roubadas.

Noam Chomsky chamou ao ChatGPT um «plagiador de alta tecnologia» que copia de livros amostrados ilegalmente para produzir texto que reflete o estilo dos autores originais.

A Amazon, que sempre aplicou software de controlo de conteúdo em todos os e-books para filtrar pornografia infantil, discurso de ódio e negacionismo do Holocausto, adicionou um detetor de IA. No entanto, continua a permitir o carregamento de livros gerados por IA na plataforma (máximo de três por dia por utilizador), sem etiquetas ou avisos visíveis para os clientes. Entre 10.000 e 40.000 «fraudes literárias» produzidas por IA inundam a plataforma todos os meses, enganando os consumidores e chegando mesmo a colocá-los em perigo (por exemplo, quando «guias» não verificados prescrevem tratamentos sem sentido, conselhos de vida fatais, ou declaram que cogumelos venenosos são comestíveis).

Ao mesmo tempo, os livros reais de autores humanos tornam-se menos visíveis, e as receitas da autopublicação estão a encolher. Por exemplo, a remuneração dos escritores através do modelo de partilha de receitas da Kindle Direct Publishing está a diminuir, à medida que mestres de bots e outros utilizadores sem escrúpulos embolsam uma grande parte do dinheiro. Os livros gerados por IA são frequentemente feitos para se assemelharem aos verdadeiros lançamentos de autores conhecidos (ou são apresentados como «resumos» e «material secundário»). Biografias de pessoas famosas, lançadas quase instantaneamente após a sua morte, são também uma forma fácil de ganhar dinheiro com IA.

Um fenómeno semelhante pode observar-se no setor da música: segundo um estudo da aplicação de streaming Deezer, 34 por cento das canções carregadas diariamente na plataforma são geradas por IA, o que, por sua vez, reduz a remuneração de compositores e músicos humanos através do modelo de receita partilhada das plataformas.

Tradutores, ilustradores e narradores de audiolivros são os grandes perdedores neste jogo. As aplicações geradoras de texto são amplamente usadas em todo o mundo, incluindo dentro do setor editorial. A Amazon acabou de lançar o seu «serviço de tradução» por IA para autopublicadores. No Reino Unido, um terço dos tradutores relatou ter perdido trabalho devido à IA, e 37 por cento dos ilustradores viram o seu rendimento diminuir pela mesma razão. Os tradutores estão a começar a mudar de profissão ou a trabalhar como pós-editores mal pagos, reparando textos e traduções gerados por máquina. Entretanto, vários narradores de audiolivros disseram-me, em confidencialidade, que se veem perante a escolha entre aceitar que as suas vozes sejam clonadas, ou serem «colocados na lista negra» pela indústria.

No Reino Unido, um terço dos tradutores relatou ter perdido trabalho devido à IA, e 37 por cento dos ilustradores viram o seu rendimento diminuir pela mesma razão. Os tradutores estão a começar a mudar de profissão ou a trabalhar como pós-editores mal pagos, reparando textos e traduções gerados por máquina.

Pagar aos escritores pela utilização passada ou futura do seu trabalho iria, segundo as gigantes tecnólogicas, prejudicar o desenvolvimento da IA. A administração Trump está do lado dos oligarcas tecnológicos: em maio, despediu Shira Perlmutter, chefe do Gabinete de Direitos de Autor dos EUA, depois de o seu gabinete ter divulgado um relatório que concluía que os usos não autorizados de obras protegidas por direitos de autor para treinar sistemas de inteligência artificial generativa poderiam ser ilegais. (O Supremo Tribunal suspendeu, por agora, a demissão de Perlmutter.)

A linha de defesa da Google é a de que as máquinas não são assim tão diferentes de um humano a ler um livro. No entanto, os humanos não conseguem memorizar livros inteiros, nem copiam o seu conteúdo como modelo de negócio. Nenhum autor que queira construir ou manter uma reputação se apropria do estilo de outro; em vez disso, dedica milhares de horas de trabalho a encontrar a sua voz única e original. O truque de equiparar máquinas a humanos e atribuir direitos humanos às máquinas é popular entre as GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft; a OpenAI deveria ser acrescentada a esta lista) para evitar pagar aos autores.

Isto não é surpreendente no setor cultural. As empresas tecnológicas têm uma longa tradição de pilhar ideias de escritores e poetas. Ciborgues, máquinas humanoides, a internet, as redes sociais, máquinas de escrever automáticas omniscientes, videochamadas, carros autónomos e robôs domésticos existiram todos na literatura muito antes de aparecerem no mundo real. Os verdadeiros inovadores não são Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman e Bill Gates, mas Stanisław Lem, E. M. Forster, Neal Stephenson, George Orwell, Mary Shelley, Karel Čapek e Isaac Asimov, entre outros. Termos como avatar, robô, mundos virtuais ou metaverso também têm origem nas mentes de autores.

Os humanos não conseguem memorizar livros inteiros, nem copiam o seu conteúdo como modelo de negócio. Nenhum autor que queira construir ou manter uma reputação se apropria do estilo de outro; em vez disso, dedica milhares de horas de trabalho a encontrar a sua voz única e original.

Deveríamos nós, escritores, deixar de conceber tais ideias, sabendo que muito provavelmente se tornarão realidade?

Perder a própria voz

Não devíamos. O poder dos seres humanos de imaginar utopias ou distopias nunca antes concebidas é o que os distingue das máquinas. Se as máquinas viessem a apoderar-se da narrativa da humanidade, a evolução primeiro estagnaria e depois regrediria. O óbvio desenraizaria por completo o extraordinário – nenhuma ideia nova, nenhuma nova proposta de coexistência, nenhum novo conceito para dar sentido a policrises em constante evolução.

Prevê-se que, até 2030, a infraestrutura física que alimenta as aplicações de IA venha a exceder as necessidades energéticas de toda a força de trabalho humana.

Os direitos de autor e os direitos morais, o direito à integridade e a não ser censurado, o direito dos autores de decidir como e por quem as suas obras e o seu trabalho são usados – estes não são direitos exclusivos de profissionais culturais e artistas. São o resultado de uma mudança de paradigma na autoperceção da humanidade: o reconhecimento da criatividade humana, do livre arbítrio, da individualidade, da autonomia e da capacidade de decisão. E também da responsabilidade individual: todo o autor, seja profissional ou amador, blogger ou comentador no Facebook, é responsável por aquilo que exprime; e, ao mesmo tempo, tem permissão para o fazer. Os direitos de autor dizem respeito à liberdade.

Escrever ou dedicar-se a atividades artísticas tem também um efeito multifacetado na identidade humana: quem consegue pensar consegue decidir; quem consegue decidir consegue agir. Quem consegue ler, compreender e escrever é menos suscetível à propaganda, à desinformação e à manipulação, venha ela das «promoções» da Black Friday ou de forças políticas antidemocráticas. Podem ser participantes ativos na democracia, em vez de meros consumidores ou eleitores. Em contrapartida, quem depende da linguagem automatizada já não consegue falar por si próprio; perde a sua voz.

Quem consegue pensar consegue decidir; quem consegue decidir consegue agir. Quem consegue ler, compreender e escrever é menos suscetível à propaganda, à desinformação e à manipulação, venha ela das «promoções» da Black Friday ou de forças políticas antidemocráticas.

Ter voz própria e saber usá-la é ainda mais necessário face às crises democráticas, sociais e ecológicas que enfrentamos. Do ponto de vista ecológico, a IA deveria ser encarada com a mesma atitude crítica que outrora se dirigiu aos clorofluorocarbonetos ou à poluição por partículas. Prevê-se que, até 2030, a infraestrutura física que alimenta as aplicações de IA venha a exceder as necessidades energéticas de toda a força de trabalho humana. É provável que numerosos empregos desapareçam, não só no setor cultural, aumentando o fardo sobre Estados que já se debatem com o desemprego e o envelhecimento das populações. Se isto acontecer, um punhado de monopólios de comunicação terá cimentado o seu domínio, determinando também a orientação política da Europa. Este seria o desfecho final da globalização digital, um sistema em que poucos decidem o destino de muitos – a menos que os muitos decidam usar a sua voz.

Quem depende da linguagem automatizada já não consegue falar por si próprio; perde a sua voz.

Adeus à liberdade?

O autor individual, enquanto ator liberal e responsável, está a ser apagado pela simulação de comunicação automatizada. A IA generativa é, na verdade, degenerativa: perturba as capacidades de quem a usa regularmente, e fá-lo à custa dos trabalhadores da palavra.

O anseio por uma máquina superior aos humanos, um golem, um deus ex machina, é o eterno defeito humano. É um desejo de criar uma entidade maior, mais permanente, melhor do que a humanidade, e de mergulhar com deleite numa passividade infinita e reconfortante, enquanto o piloto automático assume o controlo. Finalmente livre! Livre da responsabilidade e da necessidade de tomar decisões. Livre do fardo desta vida hedionda e confusa, com as suas muitas crises e humilhações.

Talvez essa seja a consequência mais lamentável da atual religião das máquinas: aqueles que não escrevem nem falam, mas deixam que as máquinas escrevam e falem por si, abraçam a supressão da sua própria liberdade de expressão.

O lítio pode estar no coração da transição verde, mas a extração deste elemento metálico também causa danos aos ambientes naturais. Em Portugal, país rico em lítio, comunidades rurais modestas juntam-se à indignação nacional contra acordos governamentais que ignoram as economias locais e ameaçam meios de subsistência.

À primeira vista, Covas do Barroso, aninhada entre montanhas verdes no norte de Portugal, não é mais do que um punhado de casas de pedra reunidas junto ao cruzamento de duas estradas. A aldeia, com cerca de 150 habitantes, tem as tradições da pecuária e da agricultura como base da sua economia local. Mas as terras de Covas do Barroso são também valiosas por outra razão: são ricas em reservas de lítio. E, desde 2016, a Savannah Resources, uma empresa britânica que tem apenas o Barroso na sua carteira, tem vindo a desenvolver planos para uma mina a céu aberto na área. A empresa estima que a mina poderia ser explorada durante 12 anos, empregaria até 250 trabalhadores e forneceria lítio suficiente para 500 mil baterias de carros elétricos por ano.

Uma vista geral de Covas do Barroso. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli Um acordo controverso

Portugal é conhecido como o maior e, com efeito, o único local significativo de produção de lítio na União Europeia. Até agora, o lítio do país só foi extraído em combinação com o feldspato para abastecer a indústria cerâmica. Mas o crescimento da produção global de lítio, ligado ao fabrico de baterias, especialmente para veículos elétricos, tem impulsionado o desenvolvimento de uma cadeia de produção específica na UE. No âmbito da sua Lei das Matérias-Primas Críticas, a Comissão Europeia estipulou que, até 2030, pelo menos 10 por cento da procura europeia de matérias-primas críticas como o lítio deve ser satisfeita a partir de fontes internas. Em Portugal, as empresas mineiras receberam aprovação para novos projetos em áreas como o Barroso, Romano, Alvarrões e Argemela. E há pedidos de exploração pendentes em muitas outras áreas do país.

Portugal é conhecido como o maior e, com efeito, o único local significativo de produção de lítio na União Europeia. A Comissão Europeia estipula que, até 2030, pelo menos 10% da procura europeia de matérias-primas críticas como o lítio deve ser satisfeita a partir de fontes internas.

A Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente deu a sua aprovação preliminar à avaliação de impacto ambiental do projeto do Barroso no final de maio de 2023, e a construção estava prevista para começar em 2024. Mas muitos residentes acham que a mina da Savannah Resources não deveria ser construída. Desde o início, os habitantes locais opostos ao projeto fundaram a Unidos em Defesa de Covas do Barroso (UDCB), uma associação local que organiza manifestações, assembleias, acampamentos de protesto e ações legais.

Uma pequena pedreira de pedra na zona perto do Romainho, na área de Covas do Barroso. A área é historicamente uma zona de extração para a construção de casas de pedra. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

O plano de mineração é também altamente controverso junto da população mais alargada da região. E, em Portugal, a mineração é mais do que uma questão local: as concessões de exploração em Barroso e Montalegre estiveram no centro de uma investigação de corrupção que levou a buscas em gabinetes parlamentares em novembro de 2023 e que resultou na demissão do então primeiro-ministro António Costa. A faixa que dá as boas-vindas aos visitantes de Covas do Barroso diz-nos que «Não às Minas, Sim à Vida», e coloca questões incontornáveis ao modelo global de transição verde.

Algumas faixas no centro de Covas do Barroso contra a abertura da mina. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli Em defesa do Barroso

Vila Real, nordeste de Portugal, 24 de outubro de 2023. A sala B.02 da Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro está cheia. Toda a atenção está voltada para o primeiro orador de um debate público organizado pelo Centro de Estudos Transdisciplinares para o Desenvolvimento (CETRAD): «Chamo-me Nelson Gomes e vivo em Covas do Barroso.» Como presidente da UDCB, Nelson explica que as minas iriam perturbar completamente o ambiente do vale e a vida dos seus habitantes. «Acusam-nos de não estarmos dispostos a sacrificar-nos pelo planeta,» diz Nelson, «mas nós já nos sacrificamos com o nosso modo de vida e a nossa agricultura.»

A audiência é composta por estudantes, professores, investigadores, pessoas interessadas. «É uma falsificação falar de uma transição verde justa,» diz Mariana Riquito, investigadora da Universidade de Coimbra. «Não pode ser justa se não respeitar a autonomia das populações locais. Não pode ser uma transição se, para a implementar, se intensifica o consumo de combustíveis fósseis. Não pode ser verde se apenas considerar o problema das emissões e não as consequências da indústria mineira e extrativa.»

«É uma falsificação falar de uma transição verde justa,» diz Mariana Riquito, investigadora da Universidade de Coimbra. «Não pode ser justa se não respeitar a autonomia das populações locais.»

À esquerda, Mariana Riquito, investigadora universitária portuguesa, e Nelson Gomes, presidente da associação «Unidos em defesa de Covas do Barroso», durante uma conferência organizada pela UTAD – Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, em Vila Real. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

Um espectador pergunta se o projeto da mina poderá, ainda assim, representar uma oportunidade de desenvolvimento para a área. Nelson responde calmamente que «Covas do Barroso é Património Agrícola Mundial pela FAO [Organização das Nações Unidas para Alimentação e Agricultura] desde 2018. A mina é incompatível com o desenvolvimento da área. Falam-nos de compensação, minimização, recuperação da paisagem. Mas a relação com a natureza é a única razão para viver num lugar tão isolado. Que desenvolvimento é possível para uma área onde ninguém quereria viver?»

Segundo Nelson, o projeto de mineração tem implicações vastas: «Precisamos de questionar a transição energética como um modelo centrado no extrativismo.» As alternativas, diz Nelson, incluiriam o desenvolvimento de transportes públicos, também nas zonas rurais, em vez de simplesmente substituir os carros privados a combustíveis fósseis por elétricos. «Tenham em mente», avisa Nelson, «que uma imposição destas pode um dia acontecer também a vocês, onde vivem.»

«Falam-nos de compensação, minimização, recuperação da paisagem. Mas a relação com a natureza é a única razão para viver num lugar tão isolado. Que desenvolvimento é possível para uma área onde ninguém quereria viver?», pergunta Nelson Gomes, presidente da Unidos em Defesa de Covas do Barroso.

Impactos locais

Uma ribeira, mais cheia depois das chuvas, corre sobre a estrada que leva à aldeia de Alijó. «Venho até aqui porque posso usar alguns dos pastos para o gado,» diz Paulo, um pastor com 170 ovelhas. O seu negócio, tal como o de outros pastores e agricultores de Covas do Barroso, está ameaçado pela mineração de lítio. «Parte das minhas terras corre o risco de ser incluída na área da mina. Onde vou então levar as ovelhas a pastar?»

Paulo teme que as fontes de água do vale sejam comprometidas: «Com as perfurações, alguns agricultores já se queixam da falta de água nos poços. O que vai acontecer aos bebedouros e às ribeiras?»

Paulo Pires, pastor de Covas do Barroso, a levar o seu rebanho de ovelhas a pastar perto de Alijó, uma aldeia a 4 km de Covas do Barroso. Paulo é um dos residentes locais que se opõem à construção da mina de lítio da Savannah. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

Embora reconheça a necessidade de uma transição energética, Paulo considera importante alargar a visão: «Claro que é preciso lítio para as baterias. Mas devíamos perguntar-nos para que usamos esta energia. Será que o lítio vai tornar o consumismo sustentável? E de que transição verde estamos a falar se destruímos espaços verdes? Olhe», exclama a rir, «aqui está tudo verde!»

Precisamos de questionar a transição energética como um modelo centrado no extrativismo.

«Opusemo-nos à mina de lítio desde o início,» diz o [à data original deste artigo] presidente da Câmara de Boticas, Fernando Queiroga, sentado à sua secretária na sede municipal responsável por Covas do Barroso, a quase 20 km da aldeia. «É um tipo de atividade mineira diferente das que já existiam na área,» explica. «Pode afetar as condições de vida e a saúde dos membros da nossa comunidade.» Na linha de Paulo, considera que o abastecimento de água doce da área, nomeadamente as fontes subterrâneas, são uma preocupação chave: «Estamos muito alarmados porque há o risco de a mineração comprometer o nível freático.»

Fernando Queiroga, presidente da Câmara Municipal de Boticas em 2024. O presidente é uma voz crítica contra a construção da mina de lítio de Covas. Nesta fotografia, é visto no seu gabinete em Boticas. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

«Dizem que uma área tão pouco povoada só pode beneficiar com um projeto destes,» diz Queiroga com um sorriso sarcástico, «mas se olharmos para a cadeia de valor do lítio, além da mineração – produção de baterias, fabrico de carros elétricos e, por fim, reciclagem de baterias – todas essas atividades industriais serão tratadas noutro lugar. Nada vai ficar aqui.» Sobre as perspetivas futuras da região, usa palavras diretas: «No que estiver ao nosso alcance, não daremos autorizações. Se o governo decidir avançar, arrisca-se a enfrentar uma revolta popular.»

«Quando abri, há mais de vinte anos, a aldeia era animada,» diz o idoso dono do único café de Covas. «Agora há cada vez menos habitantes. Até a escola fechou há muito tempo.» Perante a inexorável despovoação, o dono do bar talvez espere que o projeto de mineração traga desenvolvimento e novos clientes, e mostra-se menos crítico do que a maioria dos outros habitantes locais. «O meu bar é para todos, não toma partido na questão do lítio!»

O único café aberto na pequena aldeia de Covas do Barroso, no norte de Portugal. Nesta área, designada pela FAO como património agrícola mundial, a empresa britânica Savannah quer construir a maior mina de lítio da Europa. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

Mas, junto à porta, um cliente com uma bebida na mão exprime uma opinião diferente: «Claro que alguns venderam as suas terras [ao projeto da mina]. Mas como é que se pode abandonar tudo? Com esse tipo de dinheiro, não é possível mudar-se e mudar de vida», diz.

A resistência

«Agora está bem!» Mariana, que acabou de limpar a entrada da antiga escola primária de Covas do Barroso com a sua amiga Paloma, parece satisfeita com o trabalho de ambas. Fechado durante muitos anos, o edifício renasceu como A Sachola, graças à iniciativa de jovens que, como elas, se mudaram para aqui para apoiar a luta contra a mineração. A faixa à entrada diz Encontro Solidário Anti-Extrativista. «Temos de acabar de preparar o espaço», explica Mariana, apontando para a grande sala interior. «Daqui a uma semana, vamos ter uma sessão de cinema. Queremos que este espaço seja um ponto de encontro e de convívio para os habitantes da aldeia mas, ao mesmo tempo, um ponto de encontro entre a comunidade local e quem vem de fora.»

Aida Fernandes, presidente da associação de terras de Covas do Barroso, Baldios, está empenhada em proteger as áreas comunitárias de terra mais ameaçadas pelos projetos de mineração. «A Savannah comprou alguns terrenos, mas está a decorrer muita perfuração nos baldios, sobretudo nas florestas», explica Aida. «Queremos travar as obras, reivindicando o uso dessas terras para a comunidade.»

Aida Fernandes, residente de Covas do Barroso e criadora de gado. É presidente dos «Baldios – terra comunitária, terra de uso cívico», e é contra a construção da mina de lítio. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

Nos últimos anos, muitas pessoas vieram a Covas do Barroso para conhecer a luta dos seus habitantes. Aida conta como as situações de intercâmbio são muitas vezes recíprocas: «Em outubro [de 2023], participámos num encontro internacional contra a mineração em Espanha, porque é importante estarmos unidos face a um adversário tão poderoso.»

Ganhar a guerra

Os projetos de exploração massiva das reservas de lítio provocaram protestos entre os habitantes de muitas áreas rurais de Portugal. Tal como no Barroso, também se formaram comissões e movimentos na Serra da Estrela, em Argemela e em Penalva, só para citar alguns. Uma pluralidade de vozes uniu-se em várias ocasiões: em manifestações conjuntas em Lisboa, em assembleias em Coimbra e noutros locais, num acampamento de protesto anti-mineração que se realiza anualmente em Covas do Barroso.

Do Miradouro do Olhar do Guerreiro, é possível ver todo o vale. As áreas de perfuração, parcialmente cobertas por vegetação, veem-se por todo o lado. Aida aponta para um ponto a sudeste da aldeia, uma extensão de pinheiros numa encosta. «Ali é a área onde eles estão mesmo a concentrar-se. Parece ser a mais rica [em lítio],» diz. «Pensem só, aquela área toda vai tornar-se numa mina a céu aberto. Vai ser escavada até 150 metros de profundidade, com um diâmetro de 500 metros. 80 por cento do material será resíduo. Os restantes 20 por cento terão de ser lavados, inclusive quimicamente, para extrair o lítio ali contido.»

A área em torno de Covas do Barroso, designada pela FAO como Património Agrícola Mundial. No centro, entre a vegetação, a primeira escavação da Savannah, a empresa britânica que tem planos para construir uma mina de lítio na área. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

Recentemente, a luta contra a extração de lítio em Covas do Barroso tem recebido amplo apoio de diversos setores da sociedade. «Isto não é sobre atrasar as obras e obter pequenos resultados», diz Aida com determinação. «Não basta vencer batalhas. É preciso ganhar a guerra!»

A sede (ponto de informação) da Savannah em Covas do Barroso, no norte de Portugal. A Savannah é a empresa britânica que quer construir a maior mina de lítio da Europa na área do Barroso. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

Com o sol a pôr-se, um agricultor atravessa a praça central da aldeia, levando as suas vacas para o estábulo com uma enxada ao ombro. De um lado fica o campo desportivo, onde se realizou o acampamento de protesto contra a mineração de lítio; inúmeras faixas coloridas estão penduradas na vedação. Clamam contra a mineração, pela vida da aldeia, pela água e pela natureza. Mesmo em frente, do outro lado da praça, fica o pequeno escritório da Savannah, escondido atrás de uma porta escura, vigiado por câmaras.

Enquanto os movimentos de extrema-direita apertam o seu domínio sobre a política europeia e procuram capturar a cultura – comprando meios de comunicação, instalando figuras partidárias nas instituições culturais e deslocando as fronteiras do discurso público –, um contraciclo está a emergir. Por todo o continente, «artivistas» estão a reconquistar a cultura como um espaço de resistência democrática e a usar a arte para promover solidariedade e inclusão. Conseguirão reavivar a imaginação política da Europa e remobilizar os cidadãos?

É uma noite chuvosa de sábado em setembro, num antigo terreno ferroviário desativado no sudeste de Paris, agora transformado num local temporário para eventos que celebram a inovação social e cultural. Apesar do dilúvio nesta segunda noite do Festival Fluctuations, o público – uma mistura animada de homens e mulheres com idades ali entre os 20 e os 45 anos – dança com força e canta em voz alta. No palco, quatro membros do coletivo francês Planète Boum Boum montaram uma atuação enérgica.

A multidão grita em uníssono: La vraie menace n’arrive pas en bateau, elle est ici, c’est les fachos! («A verdadeira ameaça não chega de barco, já está aqui: são os fascistas!»)

Enquanto batidas frenéticas de techno trespassam a multidão, os quatro intérpretes gritam os seus slogans ao microfone com convicção. Envolvem-se em coreografias simples mas eficazes que o público consegue facilmente reproduzir. Manter o tom não interessa muito; no palco e fora dele, todos estão a passar um belo momento politicamente consciente.

Por toda a Europa, coletivos, organizações sem fins lucrativos e indivíduos estão a organizar-se para reacender a chama do envolvimento democrático. Algumas das iniciativas mais bem-sucedidas têm mobilizado ferramentas que vão além do manual tradicional do ativismo político: as artes.

E no entanto, para lá do recinto do concerto, o ambiente político é radicalmente diferente. O primeiro abalo veio em 2002, quando Jean-Marie Le Pen, fundador da Frente Nacional e veterano do exército acusado de torturar combatentes independentistas argelinos nos anos 1960, chegou à segunda volta das eleições presidenciais. Dezasseis anos depois, no entanto, o partido reinventou-se como Reagrupamento Nacional (RN, Rassemblement National) e goza agora de um apoio sem precedentes: o RN tem o maior número de representantes no Parlamento Europeu e é o maior partido na Assembleia Nacional.

Também pela Europa, o panorama político está a assumir um tom de azul cada vez mais escuro. Os partidos de extrema-direita estão no governo em mais de um quarto dos Estados-membros da UE. Mesmo nos países onde não governam, exercem uma influência considerável sobre o discurso político e público. Isto é também visível ao nível da UE, onde o Partido Popular Europeu – o maior grupo político no Parlamento Europeu – se tem alinhado cada vez mais com a extrema-direita.

Estes acontecimentos tornam cruciais os espaços de resistência – como aquele no sudeste de Paris. Por toda a Europa, coletivos, organizações sem fins lucrativos e indivíduos estão a organizar-se para reacender a chama do envolvimento democrático. Algumas das iniciativas mais bem-sucedidas têm mobilizado ferramentas que vão além do manual tradicional do ativismo político: as artes. O termo artivista é cada vez mais usado para descrever pessoas que participam em protestos através da arte.

A resistência cultural, redescoberta

Uma junção de art (arte) e activist (ativista), este termo surgiu pela primeira vez em 1997 para descrever a união de artistas Chicano nos Estados Unidos e o movimento zapatista no México. Captava um momento em que a expressão artística e o ativismo de base se fundiram para desafiar as desigualdades sociais e políticas em ambos os países. Hoje, à medida que governos de direita em países como Itália, Alemanha, Hungria e França retiram financiamento às práticas artísticas independentes ou instalam figuras politicamente alinhadas à frente de instituições culturais fundamentais, o (re)surgimento desta abordagem politicamente motivada da arte parece especialmente significativo.

«Não inventámos nada de novo», diz Marie Cohuet, membro do coletivo Planète Boum Boum. «Quando olhamos para a história das lutas em todo o lado, houve sempre pessoas a fazer música, a cantar, a montar espetáculos e a fazer coisas que, de uma forma ou de outra, ajudam a manter a luta viva a longo prazo, a criar um sentido de coesão.»

A abordagem dos Planète Boum Boum combina a natureza histórica das raves com as teorias do filósofo francês Florian Gaité, especialista em free parties. Gaité defende uma visão radical do clubbing e da dança, na qual o esgotamento inútil, fútil e improdutivo do corpo é um ato de resistência anticapitalista.

O Planète Boum Boum, um coletivo de nove ativistas que se conheceram através da organização Action Justice Climat, diz que o seu objetivo é «trazer a festa aos protestos e o protesto às festas». Dão energia a marchas ou encontros políticos e são agora também frequentemente convidados para fazer sets de DJ em clubes e eventos «apolíticos».

Apenas um membro do grupo tem formação musical formal, já que a maioria só começou a cantar quando o coletivo foi formado. Quando estes ativistas notaram que a música e a dança eram alavancas eficazes, decidiram incorporá-las no seu trabalho. A sua abordagem – que descrevem como techno-ativismo – combina a natureza histórica das raves, feitas para unir pessoas, com as teorias do filósofo francês Florian Gaité, especialista em free parties. Gaité defende uma visão radical do clubbing e da dança, na qual o esgotamento inútil, fútil e improdutivo do corpo é um ato de resistência anticapitalista.

Créditos: ©Planète Boum Boum

A ascensão em popularidade dos Planète Boum Boum começou em 2023, quando um vídeo se tornou viral mostrando alguns dos seus membros a liderar uma marcha contra as impopulares mexidas nas pensões, através da dança. Desde então, o seu perfil no Spotify acumula centenas de milhares de reproduções.

«Vivemos tempos difíceis. O nosso contexto político está a deteriorar-se. Os ataques racistas estão a explodir, e temos desigualdades profundas. À escala global, é aterrador», diz Cohuet. «Penso que há uma verdadeira necessidade de nos unirmos e sentirmos que temos um certo poder e força quando nos unimos. A música cria mesmo isso. É isso que funciona bem com o Planète Boum Boum: usamos muita caricatura, sátira e humor. É importante sentir que não estamos condenados, que temos a capacidade de mudar as coisas.»

Graças às redes sociais, a visibilidade dos «artivistas» tem crescido, sustentando organizações sociais, ambientais e antifascistas.

O coletivo aborda uma grande variedade de temas. Planète Boum Boum aborda a justiça social e climática a partir de diferentes ângulos: apela à preservação dos serviços públicos, critica as reformas injustas das pensões em plena crise climática, denuncia a incompatibilidade entre as ideologias de extrema-direita e a ação ambiental. Isto acontece num momento crucial para a Europa: apesar da crescente consciência ecológica, os partidos Verdes e a regulação ambiental têm sofrido um revés à medida que o continente lida com o elevado custo de vida e uma guerra em solo europeu. Ao mesmo tempo, os partidos de extrema-direita têm capitalizado sobre estas crises, tanto para alimentar como para responder ao sentimento de insegurança dos cidadãos. Ainda assim, graças às redes sociais, a visibilidade dos artivistas tem crescido, sustentando organizações sociais, ambientais e antifascistas.

Penso que há uma verdadeira necessidade de nos unirmos.», diz Marie Cohuet, dos Planète Boum Boum. «A música cria mesmo isso. Usamos muita caricatura, sátira e humor. É importante sentir que não estamos condenados, que temos a capacidade de mudar as coisas.

«Colaboramos regularmente com sindicatos, meios de comunicação socialmente empenhados e coletivos ligados a causas. O objetivo é tentar dar destaque aos seus esforços e dar-lhes força, seja mobilizando pessoas que normalmente não ouviriam falar destas questões, seja encaminhando-as para uma ação específica, como comparecer a uma manifestação numa determinada data, assinar uma petição, ou juntar-se a um coletivo», explica Cohuet. «Conseguimos chamar atenção para causas em momentos-chave, como a votação contra a inclusão de PFAS em produtos do dia a dia, a privatização do transporte ferroviário de mercadorias pelo governo ou as questões em torno da lei Duplomb.»

Estas histórias de sucesso tiveram uma forte repercussão na sociedade francesa. Em fevereiro de 2025, os legisladores votaram a proibição dos PFAS (conhecidos como químicos eternos) em cosméticos, roupa, calçado e ceras de esqui, a partir de 2026. Em pleno verão de 2025, mais de 2,1 milhões de cidadãos assinaram uma petição alojada na plataforma oficial da Assembleia Nacional para exigir a revogação da lei Duplomb, que incluía uma cláusula que teria permitido a reintrodução de acetamiprida, um pesticida altamente cancerígeno. Sob pressão pública, o tribunal constitucional francês anulou a disposição controversa.

A música impulsiona a mudança na Grécia

Entretanto, outras organizações artivistas optaram por atuar a uma escala mais local. Por exemplo, a El Sistema Greece usa a educação musical para reforçar a inclusão social. Oferece aulas de música gratuitas em campos de refugiados e abrigos para menores não acompanhados, bem como para a população local em centros urbanos em Atenas e Corinto.

«Trabalhamos em três níveis: os nossos alunos, as suas famílias e depois a sociedade», explica Angeliki Georgokosta, diretora-geral da El Sistema Greece. «Trabalhamos com os nossos alunos para aumentar a sua autoestima. Tentamos criar um ambiente que encoraje e motive as crianças a tornarem-se cidadãos ativos. Quando temos as nossas aulas, os nossos concertos, temos pessoas de diferentes etnias, línguas e religiões. Todas se juntam apenas pela música.» Acrescenta que o objetivo da organização é tornar a sociedade grega mais aberta à diversidade e superar o medo do recém-chegado que vemos crescer no país.

Tentamos criar um ambiente que encoraje e motive as crianças a tornarem-se cidadãos ativos. Quando temos os nossos concertos, temos pessoas de diferentes etnias, línguas e religiões. Todas se juntam apenas pela música.

– Angeliki Georgokosta, diretora-geral da El Sistema Greece.

Desde 2016, mais de 3.500 pessoas participaram nas aulas da El Sistema Greece. Só no ano letivo de 2024-2025, quase 16.000 pessoas assistiram às suas atuações.

Alunos da El Sistema Greece numa aula. Créditos: ©Ilias Stefanidis

«Fazemos concertos não só nos nossos espaços comunitários, mas também nos maiores teatros de Atenas, como o Centro Cultural da Fundação Stavros Niarchos e o Athens Concert Hall. Tentamos estar na cultura mainstream. Desta forma, pessoas que não estão diretamente ligadas aos alunos também veem esta orquestra a alcançar um bom resultado a partir de indivíduos de 40 nacionalidades diferentes e de contextos tão distintos. Queremos espalhar a semente de que isto também pode ser a nossa sociedade», diz Georgokosta. «Usamos frequentemente repertório que não é clássico nem grego. Já usámos repertório dos países de cada um dos nossos alunos. Queremos celebrar todas as pessoas que existem dentro da nossa comunidade.»

A Grécia tem vindo a reforçar os controlos de imigração desde 2019, chegando ao ponto de emitir uma suspensão de três meses dos pedidos de asilo em julho de 2025, em violação do direito internacional. O seu governo também foi acusado de corrupção. Pelo menos 325.000 manifestantes reuniram-se em Atenas e em Salónica em fevereiro de 2025 para exigir justiça pelas 57 pessoas que morreram no acidente de Tempi em 2023, entre um comboio de passageiros e um comboio de mercadorias. Este acidente ferroviário, o maior da história do país, deu origem a um escândalo político contínuo. Relatórios oficiais afirmam que o acidente se deveu a erro humano e a uma rede ferroviária com falhas de manutenção, mas as famílias das vítimas alegam que os detalhes do acidente estão a ser encobertos. Um relatório pericial que encomendaram mostra que o comboio de mercadorias transportava químicos que provocaram a explosão e a asfixia de passageiros anteriormente ilesos pela colisão.

Mas o artivismo da El Sistema Greece cria pontes em comunidades fraturadas por um discurso político polarizado e os seus alunos recorrem à organização para navegar o clima politicamente aceso da Grécia. «Estamos a ver que [estes desenvolvimentos políticos] são difíceis de processar para toda a gente, mesmo para a nossa equipa. Por isso, estamos a reunir-nos com universidades e pessoas que trabalham há muitos anos nas ciências sociais para que possam liderar discussões sobre estes temas com todos os nossos alunos. Vemos como isso é crucial. Já não podemos evitá-lo.»

Este envolvimento vai expandir aquilo que a organização já tinha iniciado com o seu programa Young Leaders, um grupo de 15 alunos que se reuniu uma vez por mês para workshops sobre como poderiam usar a música, a El Sistema Greece e a sua comunidade para tomar decisões e falar sobre temas que lhes interessam. Um dos principais objetivos do programa foi ensinar os participantes sobre os direitos das crianças e os direitos humanos, para que pudessem compreender e defender os seus direitos e os dos outros.

A El Sistema Greece realizou o concerto Echoes of the World em 2025. Créditos: ©Ilias Stefanidis

«Estamos a tornar-nos num programa mais holístico, que não é só sobre música, mas sobre como esta pode ser usada como uma ferramenta poderosa para falar sobre as questões sociais mais prementes do nosso tempo. Trata-se também de criar espaço para que as crianças falem por si próprias, se expressem e digam como deve ser o seu futuro, para que tenham voz.»

Reencantar a política

O que está em jogo para os artivistas, seja à escala nacional ou local, é a mudança de narrativa: tanto quanto a quem conta a história e encarna novos futuros, como quanto ao imaginário coletivo que está a ser promovido.

«A arte e a cultura são os últimos escudos que temos para defender a democracia, a liberdade, a nossa capacidade de compreender, respeitar e descobrir uns aos outros, e de ir além daquilo que nos torna diferentes. Também treina a nossa criatividade», diz Paula Forteza, fundadora da galeria parisiense Artivistas, que promove artivistas latino-americanos residentes em França e na América do Sul.

A equipa da Artivistas, com Paula Forteza ao centro, em Paris, na simbólica Place de la République. Créditos: ©Anne Le Breton

Forteza é copresidente da organização sem fins lucrativos Démocratie ouverte e foi deputada em França entre 2017 e 2022. Voltou-se para o artivismo como forma de explorar novos caminhos para a participação democrática, depois de perceber que a via política convencional não seria a mais eficaz para ela, dada a desconfiança institucional por parte dos cidadãos.

«O que senti na política é que faltava mesmo criatividade. Penso que os políticos fariam bem em fazer aulas ou workshops de arte para renovar as suas ideias», diz Forteza. «Penso que precisamos mesmo de desenvolver práticas artísticas. São antídotos aos valores da extrema-direita e ao que os seus porta-vozes tentam implementar: intolerância, desdém, agressão, violência e polarização.»

O que senti na política é que faltava mesmo criatividade. Penso que os políticos fariam bem em fazer aulas ou workshops de arte para renovar as suas ideias» – Paula Forteza, fundadora da galeria Artivistas.

Esta batalha cultural está a tornar-se cada vez mais complexa, à medida que a extrema-direita também tem investido fortemente na esfera cultural para amplificar as suas mensagens e deslocar a janela de Overton, de forma a espalhar um discurso alimentado pelo ódio – através da aquisição de meios de comunicação e editoras, bem como pelo financiamento de produtos culturais que perpetuam narrativas históricas ultrapassadas de hegemonia branca.

Obras de Cristian Laime e VicOh, representadas pela galeria Artivistas na feira Spera Art Fair em Montrouge, em 2025. Créditos: ©Artivistas Spera art fair

À medida que as pessoas se afastam dos meios de comunicação e da política tradicionais, os artivistas desempenham um papel fundamental na manutenção viva da luta contra a injustiça. Guiadas pela criatividade, alegria e resistência não-violenta, as suas ações podem ajudar a construir uma sociedade solidária e participativa.

Precisamos mesmo de desenvolver práticas artísticas. São antídotos aos valores da extrema-direita e ao que os seus porta-vozes tentam implementar: intolerância, desdém, agressão, violência e polarização.

«Quando estudava na Argentina, escrevi uma tese em que cruzava períodos de crise económica com a atividade cultural e a produção artística. Através dos dados, tornou-se muito claro que, em tempos de crise, a atividade cultural explodia», recorda Forteza.

«O artivismo pode certamente reencantar a política – no sentido nobre da palavra – e as batalhas em torno dos valores. Penso que fala a um público mais alargado. Tem esse tipo de sinceridade inerente à expressão artística, que vem do coração.»

As tech giants have expanded their reach into every corner of public and private life, their products and services have increasingly come to be seen as impossible to replace or reject. Yet although the cost of leaving the current technological ecosystem is immense, the price of staying in big tech’s grip is even higher. So, how can societies resist “digital colonialism”? An interview with Renata Ávila Pinto, CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation. 

This interview took place on 24 April, 2026, on the outskirts of the European Green Academy in Brussels. It has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. Some answers have been reordered thematically.

Amir Hashemi: What is digital colonialism to you?

Renata Ávila Pinto: I started using the term nearly two decades ago. At the time, I had many discussions with my colleagues in academia about the increasingly extractive practices of big tech companies. Some of them saw digital colonialism as the continuation of other colonialisms, but for me, this relationship has never been a Global South vs Global North issue. Rather, it’s a one-per-cent-against-the-99-per-cent problem.

Europeans and North Americans feel very uncomfortable when being described as colonised by a small group of people in California that, until recently, held little political or cultural power over them. “We have the rule of law, human rights principles, and strong institutions, so we’re safe,” they would say. But whether we like it or not, our culture, our way of living, and the way we interact with one another on the street are all being wiped out.

Many of us are only realising now that much of the public infrastructure we used to have – and even things as simple as a paper map or a physical menu – is disappearing fast. Now, everybody is glued to their small screens, constantly surveilled and feeding the systems that have taken control of so much of our lives.

Why have governments been unsuccessful at stopping this?

The current tech landscape is like a crumbling house whose owners keep increasing the rent without providing any maintenance. For the vast majority of people, there is no possibility of thriving in this environment. Big tech makes you pay several times for everything it provides you with: You have to pay through your taxes because, increasingly, all your government administration is done inside this ecosystem; you have to pay for an ever-expanding list of subscription services; and you are also made to pay with your data and knowledge. And as the AI race rages on, you have to pay with your planet. This is the devil’s deal that these companies get us into.

Governments and institutions use regulation as the primary way to keep tech giants in check. But this is like putting on a helmet and a safety vest and hoping to be safe when the walls collapse on you

Leaving this collapsing building requires courage and a choice – one that is political, commercial, and pragmatic. But governments and institutions say getting out is too costly. Instead, they choose to use regulation as the primary way to keep tech giants in check. But this is like putting on a helmet and a safety vest and hoping to be safe when the walls collapse on you. It hasn’t worked so far, and it will not in the future. The only viable tactic of resistance is to walk out of this crumbling building and deal with the consequences later.

How should this resistance be organised? Should governments take the lead, or is this primarily a choice for individual users?

One of the things that annoys me about certain currents of the environmental movement is their emphasis on individual choices and their belief that the general public is a big part of the problem. To me, this is victim-blaming, and it doesn’t solve the bigger issues. That said, I think we need to go for big wins, and for this, everyone has to play a role.

For all the damage that they inflict on society – on mental and public health as well as the environment – tech companies contribute very little value because their profits go to tax havens. Ongoing efforts in the EU and individual countries to ban social media use for children are a good start, but they are not enough and only chip away at the edges of the problem. Both civil society and governments can put pressure on tech multinationals through other means, including strategic litigation and refusing to engage with emerging, unnecessarily complex technologies. It is also important to expose how deeply we have come to depend on a handful of companies for everything ranging from basic services to satellites. The invisible hand of big tech must be made visible.

Assuming we are willing and able to leave behind this structural dependency on big tech and its products, what replacement should we aim for?

At the Open Knowledge Foundation, we have been pushing for public-interest technologies – tech solutions that are good enough for the purpose they serve, while staying climate-friendly, accessible, and sustainable. One proposal that we are pushing for is the local stack. A lot of what we use technology for can stay local, small, manageable, and accountable. Do we really need to go through two American corporations just to take care of our government administration or talk to the people we love?

Likewise, nowadays we see teenagers using advanced AI to make memes or edit photos. Memes are great, but we don’t need sophisticated, expensive technology to make them. You can do the same thing with a much smaller dataset. If we are going to consume vast amounts of energy and water, there should be good justification, like solving the world’s most pressing problems.

With its growing financial, political, and cultural power, big tech is increasingly closing off space for innovation. Today, if you want to release an app, you first have to agree to the terms and conditions of Apple and Alphabet. In other words, even for the simplest of tasks you have to go all the way to Silicon Valley and back. But things weren’t always like this. In the early days of the web, there was a lot more freedom to play with technology and innovate. It is this same openness that we have to aim for today to break big tech’s monopoly.

You have reinterpreted the term “digital transition”, which typically refers to the adoption of digital technologies, to describe the need to wrest these technologies out of big tech’s hands. Would you characterise this as a sort of technological degrowth?

It’s not necessarily degrowth. It is recalibration. And for Europe, it is also decoupling. There is no reason for my dating life, my medical records, and the way I interact with the state to all be in the same data centre.

The transition that I call for is from a sphere of submission to a space of control, autonomy, and more importantly, accountability. This vision is not anti-tech: it acknowledges the fact that technology mediates our lives, but refuses to accept that the current tech landscape is our best and only choice.

Such a transition also embraces friction. Without friction, you are trading away your rights for convenience or speed. In that way, it resembles and can learn from the green transition. For instance, riding a bike somewhere might take longer than taking the car, but in the eyes of those who wish to pollute less, do physical exercise, and avoid getting stuck in traffic, it is a trade-off worth going for.

What is the AI boom, coupled with the continued “enshittification” of tech platforms, doing to our knowledge systems?

It is very naïve to think that these companies will keep their services available free of charge for everyone, forever. This presents a profound danger, as more and more people get stuck in these ecosystems through years of intense interaction. And when you reach that point, it doesn’t matter whether you have a university degree or not. Everyone is vulnerable.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. But nowadays, freedom of information is no less important and no less under threat.

The system was already flawed, with browsers ranking content and burying webpages – the equivalent of a very censored library. Now, AI has made things much worse, removing the human element of knowledge seeking, curation, and presentation. We no longer have access to the “books”. There is only a voice reading certain information to us and omitting others, for reasons that we don’t know, and I think that’s terrifying. Another likely outcome is that AI companies will embed the nasty system of marketing in their products. If this happens, it will be very hard to differentiate facts from opinion, suggestion, or manipulation.

There are, of course, those who are trying to use advanced artificial intelligence for good, such as climate activists and digital rights campaigners, but there is no guarantee that access to these technologies will remain open.

Tech companies present the uncontrolled spread of advanced AI as inevitable while at every step fighting efforts to make the industry more transparent. For instance, Palantir’s “manifesto” disparages public discussions about the development of AI weapons and other digital technologies as “theatrical debates”.

Tech oligarchs often make these remarks, and they are nothing but pure rhetoric. What they want in reality is not a project of how they see the world. It’s just economic gain, power, and control. We know that one of the most polluting industries in the world is the military, and we know that one of the most polluting technologies is AI. What Palantir and its likes sell is fear, control, and global destruction.

This is precisely why openness is key, and why defending and advancing public information sources should be one of our top priorities. As Greens have correctly pointed out, large corporations have become the biggest hoarders of data, including public-interest data. This has to change.

That said, we’re not powerless to stop this. One of the things I learned from my years on Julian Assange’s defence team is that we often have far more space to act against injustice than we think we do. We have to keep pushing the boundaries and asking uncomfortable questions. There is now a small window of opportunity for this fight as well, since at no previous point have we had so many technologies that could help us map power and understand how it works in real time.

If social movements and political partisans recognise and seize this unoccupied space, I think the tech minority cannot circumvent the majority. But first, as I mentioned earlier, it is essential to get out of big tech’s playing field. If we only fight them in their own spaces, using the same platforms that they comfortably employ as megaphones, we will lose. But if we abandon their broken building, they will be shouting their empty prophecies to the walls.

Hungary has never had such a good climate bill as the one it could have now if, improbably, its parliament were to adopt the draft written by civil society and put out for public consultation. The fate of this draft legislation – which, with minimal changes, could be of outstanding quality even by international standards – depends on the stance of the Tisza government. But how will Péter Magyar and his party proceed?

Last summer, the Hungarian constitutional court ruled that the climate law passed by Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government – which liked to call itself a “champion of the climate” – was inadequate and unconstitutional. The court annulled part of the law, calling on the National Assembly to “remedy the breach of the Fundamental Law resulting from this failure” by June 2026.

Subsequently, the Fidesz government showed no interest whatsoever in the matter. But a regulatory proposal has been drawn up that is virtually ready for implementation and could even have ensured compliance with the deadline. This document was not drafted by any parliamentary group: it is the joint effort of more than 180 civil society and professional organisations, and the proposal currently under public debate is of a particularly high standard.

Built on solid principles…

One of the draft bill’s greatest strengths is that it treats mitigation (alleviating environmental harm), adaptation (adjusting to climate change), and resilience (increasing resistance) as objectives of equal importance. Unusually, the system of guiding principles is also sufficiently detailed: alongside traditional environmental law principles (precaution, the polluter pays, prevention), it also includes distinctly modern, progressive principles such as the “principle of sufficiency” (which focuses on well-being rather than maximum consumption, thereby limiting waste and the over-use of resources), a systems approach, data-driven decision-making, and proportionate individual responsibility. The fact that the prohibition on regression and intergenerational justice are linked to existing constitutional court case law indicates that the drafters of the text drew upon the few effective practices that Hungarian environmental protection has painstakingly developed over recent decades.

Particularly positive is the detailed and forward-looking approach to water management. The proposal entails the requirement to review bilateral water-sharing agreements, ensuring the public availability of groundwater monitoring data, and encourages the use of greywater. These are all elements that were previously absent from domestic legislation and would be indispensable to managing the water crisis Hungary now faces – the most tangible consequence of climate change in the Carpathian Basin.

The section on forest management is also very thorough: avoiding clearcutting, accounting for shifts in climate zones, and calling for support for species migration all point to a distinctly modern approach. Another positive aspect is the inclusion of the concepts and requirements relating to mental health and energy poverty in the cooling sector, which are absent from many otherwise modern European climate laws

The detailed description of the carbon budget mechanism (a legally binding, period-based planning and accounting framework that determines how much greenhouse gas we may emit in each period if we are serious about achieving net-zero emissions) is useful: together, the five-year rolling planning cycle, the carry-over option, the institution of infringement proceedings, and the obligation to submit final accounts form an enforceable system similar to the UK model. The requirement to introduce consumption-based emissions tracking is also welcome, as it can counterbalance the limitations of the territorial approach. The sectoral measures (building renovation, transport, industry, food consumption) are sufficiently wide-ranging and specific, whilst the establishment of an ecological hierarchy for biomass utilisation (modelled on the waste hierarchy) is particularly forward-looking.

One of the draft bill’s greatest strengths is that it treats mitigation, adaptation, and resilience as objectives of equal importance.

… and strong scientific foundations

The scientific and innovation elements of the concept are particularly strong: the Climate Innovation Centre, the National Climate Data Centre, and the introduction of funding mechanisms similar to Carbon Contracts for Difference initiatives to support emissions-reduction investments create promising institutional and financial instruments. Support for grassroots initiatives and recognition of traditional and community knowledge are also forward-looking and in line with the principle of subsidiarity. Moreover, the obligation to promote climate awareness at all levels of the education system, the development of teacher training, and measures to combat disinformation together form a coherent strategy for shaping public attitudes.

It seems useful to introduce ex-ante climate risk assessment as a separate legal institution to ensure that no government decision may be adopted without such an evaluation. Extending scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions (i.e. those related to purchased energy, on-site emissions, and arising from suppliers, respectively) to cover the entire value chain in environmental impact assessments is also a modern, ESG-compatible, and forward-looking rule.

Involving the Ombudsman for Future Generations in the ombudsman procedure in the event of a carbon budget overrun could also serve as a strong enforcement mechanism. A similar institution once existed, but the 2011 amendments to the Fundamental Law rendered it ineffective.

The enshrinement of the status of the Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Policy is clearly positive: it operates solely in accordance with the Hungarian constitution and the law and has its own budget and secretariat, and proposals relating to climate targets cannot be adopted without its opinion. The joint nomination mechanism of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) and the Hungarian Research Network (HUN-REN) also provides a safeguard against political influence. The operation of the government Committee on Climate Protection under the prime minister’s leadership provides an appropriate framework for inter-ministerial coordination, whilst the mixed (partly non-political) composition of the National Climate Protection Council can strengthen its social legitimacy.

The introduction of the concept of “climate endangerment” into Hungarian law is particularly noteworthy: the public prosecutor could also bring proceedings against major emitters, seeking compensation and a ban on their activities, which represents a significant step forward in climate litigation. The privileged legal status of civil society organisations as claimants, their right to bring legal proceedings, and an exemption from litigation fees also provide a significant safeguard. The Advocate for Future Generations’ powers to intervene and to submit motions to the constitutional court are also commendable.

The introduction of the National Climate Protection Fund is a useful initiative, as it creates a dedicated and predictable funding framework (in contrast to current practice, namely ad hoc budgetary allocations and the routine deductions affecting them). The requirement for green corporate governance obligations and transition plans – particularly in light of the fact that these obligations have been substantially relaxed following the narrowing of the scope of the EU’s CSDDD Directive – is a forward-looking and courageous step. Meanwhile, excluding activities relating to fossil fuels from development bank financing is a clear and correct direction. Furthermore, enshrining participation principles in international climate finance would be fair (although, unfortunately, it seems unrealistic in this form).

Areas for improvement

As noted, Hungarian policymakers have never faced such a well-thought-out and complex climate regulation. That said, there are some minor shortcomings and contradictions, which the current public debate could identify and iron out.

Perhaps the most striking omission is the absence of any explicit reference to the institutional framework of climate justice, including climate litigation and state liability. This would be particularly important, as the “no backsliding” and “polluter pays” principles can only be effectively implemented if backed by a strong enforcement mechanism. It would also be worth incorporating a principle of climate equity, which specifies enhanced protection for socially vulnerable groups (the poor, the elderly, and those with a higher health risk), as they bear a disproportionately greater burden from the impacts of climate change.

It is difficult to understand the complete absence of any mention of the transport sector’s resilience in the proposal. For instance, the text could at least allude to infrastructure risks from heatwaves and extreme rainfall (roads, railways, bridges) and to preparing the vehicle fleet. In the transport section, there is also no discussion of aviation and inland waterway transport, even though their emissions are by no means negligible (although, for the time being, European climate legislation also often treats these as separate categories).

The objective of “phasing out harmful state subsidies by 2030” is correct in itself, but its feasibility is doubtful unless it is accompanied by a mandatory review schedule and a public list of the subsidies concerned. Regarding the management of the National Climate Protection Fund, it would be advisable to ensure its independence from political influence and to give civil society organisations a meaningful role in decision-making (rather than merely representing beneficiaries).

The current wording of the green public procurement requirement – “preference must be given” – is far too weak. To ensure effectiveness, a specific quota requirement or a time-bound obligation should be introduced. What is more, the text includes no provision regarding the responsibility of media actors and social media platforms in combating climate disinformation. In the case of the National Climate Protection Council, limiting membership to nine and granting a minister the role of co-chair pose a risk: despite the principles of proportional representation, government influence could become dominant, particularly if the minister’s department also covers the council’s operating costs. It would be advisable to limit the minister’s role to that of an observer or a non-voting chairperson, and to place the funding under the supervision of the National Assembly.

In the case of local authorities, the phrase “The state shall provide adequate budgetary support” is too general and leaves room for abuse. At the very least, the law should set a minimum funding guarantee or a clear allocation method; otherwise, authorities in smaller parts of the country will be unable to fulfil their statutory obligations due to a lack of resources. Rules on conflicts of interest and disclosure obligations for members are lacking as well, which could allow industry lobbyists to influence the decision-making process.

In addition, it would be advisable to establish a mandatory cooperation mechanism between the Scientific Council and the Ombudsman for Future Generations. Both bodies assess compliance with the carbon budget in parallel, and without coordination, overlapping or contradictory recommendations may arise.

The scope of the climate-threatening offence also appears to be narrow, as it applies only to major emitters subject to the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), whilst medium-sized emitters – whose emissions are significant in aggregate – are excluded. To remedy this, the text should introduce a mechanism for gradual extension.

The possibility of bringing an action for failure to act in the event of a carbon budget shortfall is appropriate, but the provision includes no specific sanction if the government fails to comply even after losing the case, which substantially weakens its enforceability. Furthermore, legality oversight is a useful tool for local authority decisions, but the possibility of withholding funding could disproportionately affect smaller local authorities, which are already under-resourced. So,  it would be advisable to establish a graduated system of sanctions and an appeal mechanism.

That said, these are minor details, and there is still time to refine the bill. The more important question is whether, after its historic win, Péter Magyar’s government will have the will to do so – not just to perfect the legislation, but to put an end to the current unconstitutional situation in the first place.

The civil society document is ‘extremely thorough and wide-ranging, comparable to the most comprehensive legislation at European level’.

How will Tisza proceed?

“Experts are analysing the text of the civil society draft bill to assess what elements can be incorporated into the draft bill to be tabled by the government,” the press office of the Ministry of the Living Environment announced at the end of July.  According to the ministry, the civil society document is “extremely thorough and wide-ranging, comparable to the most comprehensive legislation at European level”. Meanwhile, legislators are also examining which elements should be regulated at statutory level, and which issues are better addressed in strategies or lower-level legislation.

According to the ministry’s position, bolder emission-reduction targets alone are not enough. “A framework must also be established setting out how these targets will be achieved, and what the roles of economic and social actors are in the transition towards sustainability.” The legislation must also address how the country can replace fossil fuels with renewables as well as how it can reduce energy consumption.

Notably, the ministry’s response suggests that Hungary’s new climate law will place much greater emphasis on adaptation than the current legislation. “Hungary is one of Europe’s most vulnerable countries to climate change,” the ministry pointed out. According to a previous ruling by the constitutional court, a legal framework must be established to ensure the preservation of the unique landscapes, wildlife, and natural assets of the Carpathian Basin. Accordingly, “The law must address in great detail adaptation to the inevitable effects of climate change and the development of flexible resilience to climate change.”

Multiple global supply shocks have made the strongest case yet for reducing dependencies by phasing out fossil fuels. But on clean energy too, Europe has grown dependent on China, the uncontested global leader. As trade tensions with Beijing intensify, Greens in particular face a difficult balancing act: How to boost the green transition without repeating past mistakes? And can they reconcile realpolitik with human rights?

When the European Union committed to cutting emissions by at least 50 per cent by 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2050, it opened up an uncomfortable question: could it hit those targets without leaning too heavily on China, its trading partner with whom relations are increasingly tense, but who now stands as the undisputed global leader in global green tech?

Today China makes up more than 80 per cent of global solar panel manufacturing capacity, but it has also established control over the supply of materials for panels: Beijing holds 70 per cent of the global supply of graphite and rare earth elements, as well as a near-monopoly on the processing of critical minerals. By contrast, the EU is almost entirely reliant on imports for critical materials.

However, recent events, such as the intensification by Beijing last year of restrictions on rare earth exports as part of a trade war initiated by the US, exposed the risks borne by an over-reliance on China in these sectors. And despite being the global leader in renewable energies, China remains the world’s largest polluter, responsible for 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Europe is now walking a thin line between trying to reduce its dependence on China in sensitive sectors while striving to meet its climate and energy transition targets. This challenge cuts across the political spectrum, but it poses a particular test for European Greens, given their commitment to ambitious climate policies and an efficient green transition. So how do Greens approach China? How do they perceive Beijing’s role when it comes to Europe’s green transition? And are they even aligned?

Common threads

Green foreign policy remains a spectrum of ideas rather than a clearly defined approach to the world’s varied issues. When the Heinrich-Böll Foundation attempted to map the foreign policies of green parties worldwide in 2022, it found common threads. Parties displayed a strong commitment to a values-based foreign policy with elements of interventionism, and emphasised the promotion of democracy, human rights, and feminism. Yet behind these lay differences on peace and security that reflect regional histories and sensibilities.

Although Greens found common ground with the left on Palestine, they often diverge on China.

Much like wider foreign policy, Green party approaches to China share broad characteristics that impact how they mobilise on human rights violations there.

“Human rights have always been a pillar [of Green foreign policy],” says Reinhard Bütikofer, a retired German Green politician who was a leading voice on China in the European Parliament (EP) between 2009 and 2024. “I recall that many Greens were appalled by the Tiananmen massacre. And the German Greens took an active role after that in upholding the arms embargo [to China]. When our coalition partner SPD [Social Democrat Party of Germany] in Berlin proposed that we should lift the arms embargo, we blocked it.”

Over the last decade, Greens have denounced the internment of ethnic minority Uyghur in political “re-education camps” in Xinjiang, and in 2019 pushed for the first resolution in the EP condemning it. The German Greens’ mobilisation on this issue resulted in their denial of entry to China.

Besides human rights, the fast adoption of renewable energy resources is a key concern. As Green MEPs fight to prevent the watering down of the Green Deal, its implementation comes with a problem: overreliance on China. Chinese imports to support Europe’s green transition have emerged as a hot potato for European Green parties.

Buy European?

Solar panels are a particular sore point. In 2023, Beijing controlled 98 per cent of global production of solar wafers – the semiconductor material critical to photovoltaic (PV) solar cells. This quasi-monopoly places a stranglehold on the rest of the global solar supply chain. Although approaches vary slightly on how Europe should shun China’s affordable solar panels while keeping the green transition going, Greens are generally wary of a new dependency on China.

“The current position of the Greens/EFA Group is that limiting purchases from China and buying more expensive European green technologies is an investment into the future,” said Markéta Gregorová, a Czech MEP elected with the Pirates who sits in the Greens/EFA Group and serves as co-chair of the EU delegation to the People’s Republic of China.

Beyond the economic logic, Chinese-made solar panel inverters – the devices that convert the current generated by solar panels to usable electricity – represent a documented cyber threat, which some Greens are particularly aware of. “As a negotiator for the revision of the EU Cybersecurity Act, I wake up at night thinking about the inverters in solar panels from China,” adds Gregorová. The worry is that through rogue communication devices recently found in Chinese-made solar inverters, Beijing could remotely access (and switch off) the solar grid. Exploiting this could destabilise national power grids. Indeed, Beijing’s hold on the kill switch was already flagged last year by intelligence agencies as dangerous.

On national stages, the issue is linked to political debates about energy sovereignty that have been reignited by external shocks. The risks of depending on Russian fossil fuels became apparent during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more recently the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is exposing more vulnerabilities in our energy supply. Samuel Cogolati, the former co-president of Ecolo, the francophone Green party in Belgium, calls for an energy transition “coherent” with the lessons from these external shocks.

“We have to hold the same line when we speak about China – I don’t think it would be in the interest of the Europeans to let supply chains concentrate in China. A very pragmatic discourse and a strategic vision [for how to restart industry] in Europe must belong to the ecologists, if we want to stay credible.”

Building consensus

In the European Parliament, trade tensions between Beijing and Brussels have stolen the limelight from issues such as human rights and the green transition. Gregorová admits that the Greens “need to speak realpolitik too, because if we [the EU] are weakened by the trade war, we can’t help anyone else.”

Yet the Greens/EFA continue to hold on to their founding commitments. “I think that we are still probably the most credible voice with regards to human rights,” said Chiara Miglioli, policy advisor to the Greens/EFA on international trade and China since 2012. When she accompanied the EP’s China delegation to Beijing in May, “everybody had the expectation that [the Greens] would raise the human rights issue. And indeed we did.”

But when it comes to playing a leadership role on China policy, it seems the Greens’ heyday is over. Past policy is embodied in the figure of Bütikofer, who in 2021 led the Greens in requesting and negotiating the EP vote to freeze the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI), a deal that supporters hoped would further open China’s internal market to EU companies. Discussions on the CAI were promptly halted in March 2021 after Beijing sanctioned five MEPs in retaliation for European sanctions against four Chinese officials believed to be linked to human rights violations in Xinjiang.

Bütikofer, the former chair of the EP’s Delegation for Relations with the People’s Republic of China (D-CN), is largely thought of as the founder of the European Greens’ China policy. “Still nowadays, many of our current positions on China have been very much shaped by him,” adds Miglioli, who advised Bütikofer on several China-related legislation and resolutions

Part of his legacy was to make Greens think of themselves as consensus builders. Bütikofer explains that building a wide majority consensus on China in the EP was his main goal. “My understanding has been that foreign policy is a realm that the member states jealously protect against European institutions. So the European Parliament could only play a role if it would stand together.”

In line with that way of thinking, today the Greens support the hard line of the Commission on China, and, says Gregorová, “are glad [it] has finally awoken to the security issues which Greens have been pointing out for a long time.” The European Parliament is now quite consensual when it votes on China, so the Greens’ role is not about forming winning majorities. “We raise the ambition of any compromise,” says Miglioli. “We have always been the ones pushing for the most ambitious option, to make sure that there are no loopholes. I believe we have succeeded.”

But a unified European China policy is still lacking. This year, the European Parliament has organised official visits to China. For Gregorová, “[they] have started going to China as kittens that have just fallen out of the basket. It has been very uncoordinated. We need to project more unity as China takes notice.”

However, merely focusing on building consensus might hinder the development of a stronger Green political line on China. Other parties have been less shy on that front. For instance, the current chair of the D-CN, German Renew Europe MEP Engin Eroglu, promotes the EU’s deregulation agenda and advocates for further deregulation measures to make European companies more competitive as a way to reduce imbalances with China. Facing such arguments, the Greens could take a clearer and stronger opposing stance, according to Miglioli. The policy advisor argues that “[Eroglu’s] focus on deregulation is a simplification and the wrong recipe because it is impossible to compete with China on production costs.”

She sees an opportunity for Greens to strengthen their voice. “Greens as a whole are not prioritising China enough as an economic issue. An anti-capitalist angle, critical of multinationals, corporate power, and vocal on labour rights and labour standards, could be an interesting idea to pursue.” She adds that “big multinationals have benefited from access to the huge Chinese market and they have really pursued profit maximisation by delocalising production to China. And now we have these huge dependencies.”

Principles versus pragmatism

However, the dependencies described by Miglioli also make it harder for Greens to build coalitions to support their policies. Nowhere is this more evident than in Germany, where Greens went from opposition to government in 2021.

Bündnis 90/Die Grünen’s Annalena Baerbock served as foreign minister until 2025. Critical of the German foreign policy consensus, Baerbock called Xi Jinping a dictator, openly criticised China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea for having no legal basis, and condemned its cooperation with Russia. In an attempt to break away from Merkel’s “quiet diplomacy”, Die Grünen tried to bring a new China strategy, defining China as “partner, competitor, and rival” while emphasising the “systemic rivalry” aspect. This sat uncomfortably with their senior coalition partner, the Social Democrats, who have traditionally been more appeasing towards both China and Russia in the name of economic pragmatism. It also upset German industry, which had grown increasingly reliant on China for exports.

These constraints pushed the Greens to evolve and water down some of their initial policy ambitions in an effort to win over Germany’s powerful industrial sector. Back in 2021, a German automotive start-up CEO described this change to the Financial Times as “a transition from a hardline environmental party to ‘a party of the bourgeoisie’.” Still, in 2024, the German Greens favoured the adoption of EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.

Now back in the opposition, Die Grünen continues to actively bring attention to China-related issues in the Bundestag. Based on Bundestag records, the party has been among the most vocal in presenting China-sceptic questions to the government this year. The Greens have scrutinised Chinese investment in Germany’s critical infrastructure and European car manufacturing, imports of Russian and Belarusian wood through China, and cybersecurity.

Left and right approaches

Greens can serve as an alternative leftist voice on China, pointing out the incoherences of leftist figures who uncritically marry anti-imperialism with a pro-Beijing stance.

“We were not trying to have a left approach to China; we wanted to have the correct approach to China”, said Bütikofer when asked if he perceived the Green position as part of a wider left-wing approach to China policy. Being Green doesn’t mean going left in Germany and Central and Eastern Europe. The German Greens are closer to the liberal centre, and the Austrian Greens even formed a coalition government with the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) in 2020.

Meanwhile, western and southern European Green parties tend to lean more towards the left. When it comes to their foreign policy, this translates into different levels of alignment with left-wing parties, whose foreign policy is often defined by a commitment to anti-imperialism and defiance of US hegemony. And although Greens found common ground with the left on Palestine, they often diverge on China.

This is particularly striking in France, where Les Écologistes prove that a Green party can be both anchored in the Left and maintain a coherent critical stance on China. Under the leadership of Marine Tondelier, the party established a clear distinction between their position and that of the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI).

Following LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s call for the development of “privileged relations” between Paris and Beijing, and his downplaying of human rights violations and Beijing’s threats against Taiwan, Tondelier signed a steadfast response on her blog titled “Moving beyond the fascination for China.”

“When will we learn, us the people of the left, that anti-imperialist criticism cannot compromise itself by promoting autocracies?” asks Tondelier. “How can the Left be persuasive beyond our activist circles if we are incapable of maintaining a minimum level of consistency regarding our values?”

The post sketches out a progressive approach to China, re-affirming strong positions on human rights and democratic values, and defending a pragmatic and united policy of European engagement with Beijing. This involves cooperating with China on “segments of mutual interest”, including on the energy transition, and rejecting a simple alignment with “Washington’s crusade” against Beijing. However, the French MP is clear that the “industrialisation and electrification of Europe should be driven by European companies”, and that Chinese investment should be “limited, controlled, and contingent upon sustainable concessions” on technology transfers. Breaking with an economically liberal approach, Tondelier urges investments and planning to support a green transition.

The French case shows that Greens can serve as an alternative leftist voice on China, pointing out the incoherences of leftist figures who uncritically marry anti-imperialism with a pro-Beijing stance.

Security policy: Where Greens diverge

Security and defence remain a point of serious divergence between European Green parties. The parties, members, and voters are torn between radical pacifism and realpolitik. This translates into differences in China policy.

It seems that Green parties closer to both the geographical and political centre of Europe tend to have a more realist approach to the issue, putting emphasis on security. For the Central and Eastern European parties, this probably relates to their closer historical experience with Russia and ongoing security threats from Moscow.

In recent years, China’s impact on European security has become more palpable. Beijing maintains an official neutrality on the war in Ukraine, yet has increased its support for Russia’s war effort despite Western sanctions. Beijing continues to provide large volumes of dual-use technologies (goods, software or materials that have both civilian and military applications) vital to Russia’s military-industrial base. Further instances of transnational repression and spying operations have made Beijing a tangible security concern.

Green parties do notice and respond. The Czech Green MP Gabriela Svárovská asserts that a combined focus on “human rights, values, security, and competitiveness” is what distinguishes her party’s China policy. The Finnish ​​Vihreät’s 2025 Foreign and Security Policy Program mentions China eight times, noting its interests in the Arctic, its growing influence in Central Asia, and its threats to Taiwan.

Governing or opposing

Yet many European Green Parties still don’t have a clear China policy.

The British Greens, who made historic electoral gains under the leadership of Zack Polanski, have so far given little thought to their China approach beyond human rights concerns. Their 2024 foreign policy paper made no mention of China. Yet Chinese state threat activities on UK soil – including recognised risks of espionage, spying, and shadow policing operations, as well as cyber attacks – increasingly came under the public eye during former Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration. As the latter also attempted to reset diplomatic relations with the PRC, this seems like a missed opportunity for the Greens.

A similar thing can be said of the Danish Socialistisk Folkeparti (Green Left1), who have been part of the government coalition since June 2026. While they criticised the former government’s involvement with China in 2021 and later voiced criticism of China’s support for Russia, in recent years they have gone relatively silent. Denmark is seen as one of the more China-friendly countries in the EU and signed a strategic climate partnership with Beijing in 2023. We have yet to see how the Greens will deal with dependencies on China once they are in the governing seat. (We approached both Danish and UK Greens to elaborate on their positions on China, but did not receive a response.)

By contrast, the Hungarian Green Party LMP used to be quite vocal about the country’s ties with China, as Viktor Orbán made Budapest Beijing’s closest EU ally, as well as the Union’s top recipient of Chinese foreign direct investment. Home to numerous projects linked to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, including in critical infrastructure, Orbán’s Hungary openly opposed the European “derisking strategy” aimed at reducing critical vulnerabilities and dependencies. Not only did the former prime minister dismiss EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle (EV) imports as an “economic cold war”, he also undermined them by welcoming Chinese industrial giants to establish EV battery factories in the country.

Before it was dissolved following its failure to meet the electoral threshold in the 2024 local elections, LMP accused Orbán’s Fidesz government of “offering Hungary on a platter to Chinese investors”, compromising “the country’s natural assets, environmental treasures, and dwindling human resources”, and voiced concern about CEE becoming “an industrial backyard and dumping ground for Western countries and China”.

Opposing the government’s China policy has been crucial to the Serbian Green-left Front (Zeleno-levi Front), born from grassroots anti-corruption protests and established in its current form during the 2023 protests in Serbia. “As an opposition party, we are not trying to criticise China as much as we are trying to criticise our regime’s ties to China,” says the party’s international secretary Marko Vujačić.

In the Serbian context, Green China criticism stems not from trade imbalances, but mainly from the negative environmental impact of Chinese investment in copper and gold mining and the exploitative working conditions of workers in Chinese factories.

“Although the party does not have a clear constructive China policy, it exercises a clear line of caution towards China,” adds Vujačić, while confirming that the party has also avoided alliance with, or admiration for, the Chinese Communist Party, which is often the case with Serbian left-wing movements. “While Green parties in Serbia have historically been co-opted by the regime, the Zeleno-levi front is an exception,” said Petr Čermák, an analyst at the Association for International Affairs.

A new approach

The former dominant approach to China in Europe, led by global free trade devotees, has been “naive, depoliticised and solely centred around profit,” Tondelier wrote in her blog. As China’s activities and influence in Europe raise more political, social, environmental and security concerns, a new approach is emerging, and Green parties could seize the momentum to voice a bolder political position rooted in Green principles.

For decades, cities throughout the world have based their mobility programmes on a misguided assumption: that car ownership will only keep growing. But as more cities challenge the auto-centric model and embrace “multimodality”, a new paradigm is emerging. Bringing about this alternative vision requires not only bold, innovative solutions, but also robust new planning institutions.

For many of us, having to juggle work, school, and other daily obligations, getting stuck in traffic is a daily nuisance. In order to carry out our responsibilities, we participate in the traffic system, which costs us a lot of time and money and harms our physical and mental health.

Some of these consequences, such as safety and stress, are easy to recognise. But research tells us that daily urban mobility also has a great impact on rates of obesity, diabetes, heart complaints, respiratory illnesses, dementia, and depression, amongst other health problems. These health conditions are also linked to common harmful transport emissions, such as particles resulting from the friction of tyres on asphalt, exhaust fumes, and general noise pollution created by vehicles. What’s more, traffic also causes greenhouse gas emissions, which are directly linked to the climate crisis and other related social and ecological problems.

In order to improve urban mobility and address its problems, modern cities put special care into the planning of their urban mobility systems. To this end, one of the main goals they aspire to is becoming a “multimodal” city – a place where inhabitants can choose and combine high-quality methods of mobility, and where owning and using a car is the last option, not a compulsion. This means prioritising more active forms of movement, such as walking and riding a bicycle, especially for journeys of only a few kilometres. For longer journeys around the city, the mobility system must offer a variety of complementary combinations using high-quality public transport, such as buses and trams for short journeys, and underground trains and regional train lines for longer trips and transporting large numbers of people.

In practice, however, many cities still struggle to establish effective new planning institutions to achieve this desired result due to a variety of reasons.

Firstly, following the influence of the North American urban planning paradigm, many cities in the previous century gave priority to private cars – by dedicating street space as well as setting aside large areas for car parks – instead of, say, green spaces. This outdated planning approach assumed that the level of motorisation (i.e. the number of private cars per inhabitant) would increase and that, as a city’s population grew, more and more infrastructure would need to be dedicated to this very inefficient form of urban mobility.

Now, cities find themselves at a turning point between old and new paradigms of urban mobility planning. As the problems with the old system become clearer, a new paradigm is still developing and trying to find its way into practice. So far, it appears in cities that have been brave enough to leave behind old ways of thinking and create new, modern planning institutions. These cities, including Paris, Vienna, Helsinki, and Ljubljana, are leading by example. Although the emerging paradigm is not yet clearly defined, five main elements can often be found in their planning institutions.

This outdated planning approach assumed that the level of motorisation (i.e. the number of private cars per inhabitant) would increase and that, as a city’s population grew, more and more infrastructure would need to be dedicated to this very inefficient form of urban mobility.

The pillars of good planning

The first and most fundamental consideration in planning for multimodal cities is to have a far-reaching outlook. When it comes to urban mobility, even short-term interventions should follow long-term priorities. Taking a long-term view means considering possible future scenarios at least 20 years from now, and ideally even 30 to 50 years. Moreover, innovative thinking should be an inseparable part of this exercise to ensure that expectations of the future are not just a continuation of past trends. In concrete terms, this means we shouldn’t just assume that the rate of motorisation will grow, and that the number of cars on the road will increase as the population increases. Instead, cities must imagine alternative scenarios in which most journeys are made on foot, by bicycle, and by public transport. In other words, such a vision of the future must have citizens’ wellbeing at its heart.

This must apply to different types of people with different needs, constraints, and daily experiences of the transport system. 

In addition, a strategic planning perspective requires understanding the difference between costs and investment. Changing public transport infrastructure (and especially rail) requires millions of euros in investment, but the investment is well worth it when it is considered over 50 or even 100 years’ time – its usual length of service.

A key insight in modern planning courses entails that land use is the first and most important public policy for urban mobility. This brings us to the second pillar of multimodal city planning: the integration of spatial planning into urban mobility as part of a wider package of public policies.

As soon as you have a beginning and end point for any planned movement, you are defining a mobility system. Therefore, to realise the desired vision of the city, the spatial plan and the urban mobility system must be closely connected. This means viewing public space as a whole and considering factors like population density, planned activities, land-use diversity, and the design of all elements that make up the streetscape.

Beyond these infrastructural considerations, an integrated plan must also address economic factors, such as how public transport services, as well as educational and medical infrastructure, will be paid for. In practice, this means public policy needs to consider a package of complementary measures: those that encourage walking, cycling, and public transport, as well as measures to discourage unnecessary car use. Here, complementarity also means measures which relate to other areas of public policy, such as education, health and employment systems.

The third element crucial in successful urban planning is having quality data about mobility systems for different groups of people. The basic idea taught in traffic management courses for decades is that cities must follow a digital-numerical model of urban transport systems. This enables the modelling of a series of steps – from how the need to move around develops to how movement equates to traffic flow on this or that street or line of public transport. A computer model like this is ideal for examining the complex consequences of different intervention packages, because it not only allows us to understand the problems that exist today, but also enables us to explore different future scenarios relatively cheaply. Urban mobility models should be built based on relevant data about people’s daily travel habits as well as their characteristics and desires. This kind of analysis is usually done through questionnaires that ask residents about their current and desired travel patterns.

That said, models and surveys are not enough on their own. A modern planning institution needs to collect large amounts of automatic data, as well as data that enables deeper analysis. One example would be information collected anonymously and automatically by smartphone, through analysis of telecommunication network signals or various applications using GPS or other telephone sensors. Another useful strategy would be collecting data about reasons for travel, such as attitudes and beliefs, as well as information about the characteristics of movement for particular groups of people – data obtainable only through carrying out surveys or interviews with the relevant population sample.

Perspective is key

You may have noticed that this text does not use the traditional term “traffic planning”, but instead talks about mobility planning. This is one of the important assumptions that a modern urban planning institute should have. The aim of planning is not to enable traffic flow or prevent traffic congestion. Those are important elements to consider, but the primary concern is creating a system that enables people to move around the city and gives them access to all the various activities a city can provide within a certain timeframe. This must apply to different types of people with different needs, constraints, and daily experiences of the transport system. Therefore – and this is the fourth pillar of good planning – evaluating different scenarios must include systemic perspectives as well as those of citizens themselves.

The city’s inhabitants themselves should be included in the planning process – not only at the end, when the alternatives are being evaluated, but already in the early stages, when alternative scenarios of the future are being created.

On the one hand, it is necessary to show with a model what the cumulative effects of any mobility infrastructure will be, for example in greenhouse gas emissions caused by the transport system, or the overall level of noise on one street. On the other hand, it is necessary to assess whether an alternative system can offer a functional and high-quality daily experience of mobility infrastructure. The model mentioned in the third pillar is a way to achieve this, but we can also use other methods. One of these solutions, which can be called the “person method,” evaluates mobility systems from the perspective of specific groups, such as children, older people without access to a car, or young parents with limited financial means.

It must be noted that high-quality planning focuses not solely on the content, but also on the infrastructure development process itself. The essence of a modern planning institution is a carefully considered process that develops through a series of clearly defined activities over time, with shared and clearly defined responsibilities for all participants. It is vital to include a range of experts, in addition to those who traditionally take part in urban mobility planning projects. For example, a high-quality process should include experts in regional economics, sociology, psychology, and the environment. What’s more, the city’s inhabitants themselves should be included in the planning process – not only at the end, when the alternatives are being evaluated, but already in the early stages, when alternative scenarios of the future are being created.

A planning process that explicitly includes different perspectives – the last of the five pillars – makes it possible to develop solutions that take into account citizens’ needs and experiences, rendering the various public policy measures more acceptable to them. Citizen participation itself can be organised using traditional methods, such as workshops and public hearings, as well as through modern digital tools like online questionnaires which use interactive maps. These tools provide valuable data, comments, and suggestions from citizens which can be directly linked to concrete locations in the city. Such an inclusive approach demands robust cooperation and entails constructive conflict between different values and assumptions about life in the city.

Towards a 21st-century paradigm

Cities have always changed and will continue to do so, along with humanity itself. New forms of mobility will appear in the transport system, as we have recently witnessed with the arrival of electric scooters on streets across the world. People’s habits will also change and diversify, leading to ever-increasing demands on urban mobility systems. Thanks to the rise of remote working, we are also seeing a change in people’s mobility habits.

Even though the majority of these and other aspects will remain extremely difficult to predict, one thing is certain: planning institutions need to change. They need to rise to the challenges of the 21st century in order to respect the needs of citizens as well as the environment. New institutions will also have to think carefully about how to invest in effective, applicable interventions that fulfil the desired objectives of new mobility paradigms. Only through the development of visionary and brave planning institutions can a city of wellbeing emerge.  

This article first appeared in Serbian in Omorika. It is republished here with permission. Translated by Alex Melbourne | Voxeurop