Green European Journal

Caught between a return to an ecologically blind abundance agenda and degrowth environmentalism that offers no aspirational material vision, ecosocialism can choose a third option: a version of ecological modernisation that champions abundance within planetary boundaries. Revolutions in renewable energy and agriculture bring this outcome within reach.

 “The worst possible crisis, at the worst possible moment.” Xan López’s concise, clear-eyed diagnosis summarises the Left’s position 25 years into the 21st century. We are faced with a political turning point, one that threatens to wipe out democracy and the planet itself in one fell swoop. A reactionary political wave is surging, and must be stopped before it achieves the neoliberal goal of undoing all social progress made since 1945 – even the political progress made since the French Revolution of 1789 is under threat. At the same time, we must fight this wave while also decarbonising the planet within the next 25 years. Failure to do so could result in a climate breakdown that, if left unabated, could leave 3 billion people stuck in uninhabitable regions by the end of the century, thus jeopardising the very existence of civilisation as we know it.

These two colossal tasks will determine the course of our species long into the future, but both rely on the Left at a time when the movement is politically weak and poorly organised; perhaps the lowest point in its entire history. A strategic rethink is now an existential imperative.

The abundance agenda

In recent years, one proposal in particular has impacted the renewal of leftist policy: the abundance agenda. This paradigm emerged after the publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s 2025 book Abundance, and proposes that the Left cannot simply settle for the redistribution of scarce resources – it has to rediscover its own productivism and offer a new strategy for material expansion. In order to recover its ability to propel massive infrastructure projects – whether in housing, transport, or energy – Klein and Thompson propose that the Left must abandon its current political ethos of shying away from material change. According to their diagnosis, some progressives have retreated into a political culture of caution, regulation, protection, and the preventive vetoing of anything that could upset the established social balance, even when innovations could solve urgent social problems such as Western society’s housing crisis.

In many respects, Klein and Thompson’s book is too US-centric. Not all countries face the same obstacles of hyper-regulation as the US, and many Americans see their relative material stagnation as a sign of an empire in decline, in contrast to China’s rapid rise. Abundance received well-deserved criticism from the Left for its tendency to conflate democratic participation with bureaucratic stagnation, as well as for its centrist (or liberal, to a US audience) concern for the supply of goods while failing to question artificial scarcity, markets, or capitalist property structures.

Nevertheless, the book has resonated far beyond the US progressive scene because it highlights something that the Western Left is missing: that the possibility of restoring our power lies in rebuilding a tangible, compelling, and unapologetic promise of collective prosperity, just as it did in the 19th and 20th centuries. As Matt Huber, Leigh Phillips, and Fred Stafford write in their article “Abundance for the 99 Percent”, “The anarchists planned to take over the mines, not shut them down.”

One of the Left’s biggest political mistakes over the last 50 years has been limiting itself to protecting egalitarian moral values, thus handing the enticing rhetoric of aspiration and civilisation to the Right. However, simply expressing indignation and a desire to topple corrupt elites is not enough for a people to reach its full potential, something requisite for any process of transformation. There needs to be a horizon, an aiming point where things will one day get better. For much of the population – who suffer in precarity and acute material need, and who understand progress not as some tired teleological myth but as a legitimate expectation for survival – this “something better” will always entail an experience of material comfort, and even a certain degree of luxury, that the notion of abundance can offer.

There needs to be a horizon, an aiming point where things will one day get better.

Degrowth thinking

If this historically obvious idea seems provocative to large parts of the progressive community, it is at least in part because ideas of degrowth environmentalism are exerting an ever-growing influence on ecosocialism – and by association, on the Left as a whole. The term degrowth (and its sibling post-development, born from the Global South’s experiences of colonisation) covers a veritable galaxy of ideas that cannot be treated as a whole without straying into clichés. There is a huge difference between, for instance, Jason Hickel’s post-capitalist environmentalism – which champions degrowth via a global “Green New Deal”, a massive rollout of renewable energy – and programmes like that of Spain’s Adrián Almazán and Luis González Reyes, who challenge the renewable nature of any large-scale industrial technology and advocate for degrowth based on mass rural, economic, social, and community development.1

However, some common ground remains. Both ends of the spectrum – though to varying degrees – criticise and reject economic growth; not solely from a moral standpoint, but also because it is biophysically impossible on a planet that is dangerously surpassing its ecological limits. Advocates of degrowth thus envisage a 21st century characterised by forced adaptation – with varying degrees of social disruption – to more constrained material conditions; a new era in which, compared with times of great industrial acceleration, various forms of relative and absolute scarcity will become the new norm. They argue that there is a metabolic bottleneck that technology cannot resolve, which will prevent us from continuing the rapid, expansive trends of the modern era – including population growth and mass urbanisation – that are an exception to the planet’s historical norm.

Under degrowth, future sustainability can only derive from a corrective shift towards more restrictive material and environmental conditions. Degrowth scenarios range from gently bringing ourselves within planetary limits to predictions of widespread impoverishment and the collapse of industrial society, a material step backwards that we would need to willingly embrace and prepare for in order to minimise its impact. The degrowth movement also argues that this historic transformation could be mitigated to some extent through redistribution, socialising consumption, and cultural transformations in our everyday lives. Out of these schools of thought, however, the most politically astute understand that environmental austerity is deeply unappealing to the masses, and instead highlight the social abundance that will follow and allow us to explore new ways of living beyond the modern age.

A non-Malthusian environmentalism

Ecosocialism’s slide towards degrowth is not just a product of capitalism’s broken metabolic systems – it is also fuelled by a cultural, ontological, and moral wariness of modernity as inherently alienating and oppressive, a shift that constitutes a refounding of the Left’s historical strategy.

In the late 18th century, Nicolas de Condorcet and William Godwin laid the axiological foundation of progressive environmentalism. They did this by arguing that, among all of humanity’s possible futures, there is potential for a virtuous circle between societal perfection and ever-increasing material abundance, a self-perpetuating loop that could be brought about through emancipatory political reforms. Thomas Malthus challenged this promise by highlighting the limits of nature as an obstacle that humanity could never overcome. Though his work focused on agricultural productivity – the great environmental cause of his era – his reasoning can be applied to all natural resources. For Malthus, the clash between nature’s limits and human expansion constituted a universal condition – one that is as tragic as it is unavoidable. Accordingly, he suggested that any future for humanity would require societal restrictions, because scarcity could never truly be overcome. As Ernest García points out, this idea shaped the logic and core arguments – now endlessly revisited and reformulated – of two centuries of debate among the Left and the environmental movement.2

Malthusianism has been one of the most vital schools of thought in the environmental movement, and should not be exaggerated or misinterpreted. However, in a distorted yet somewhat effective way, neo-Malthusian environmentalism has introduced the Left to one of environmentalists’ greatest contributions to philosophical thought: the notion of a natural limit that humanity’s social or technological will cannot overcome. This naturalist realism – or, to use Marxist terms, the relatively autonomous reality traditionally categorised as “nature” – offers a vital antidote to the Left’s socio-centric tendencies, especially because it reveals an ontological asymmetry that we are culturally programmed to deny: natural forces can be the undoing of any social project, but no social project can dictate the natural conditions of its own existence. For example, communism cannot magically reduce atmospheric CO2 levels, but a certain amount of atmospheric CO2 can thwart communism because it will thwart all forms of human civilisation. In the absence of this conceptual counterweight, contemporary humans tend to imbue technology with soothingly miraculous qualities, leaving ourselves unable to discern the dangers, harms, and pace of its environmental impacts.  

There is an undeniable cognitive benefit to the idea of a Malthusian natural limit, but it comes at a high cost. Politically, it leads us into very dangerous territory, while also instilling a whole series of scientifically flawed assumptions in our way of thinking. In terms of political dangers, Neo-Malthusianism backs us into a rhetorical corner. In the best of cases, its arguments can easily be interpreted as backing a process of voluntary adaptation to poverty. In the worst, it runs the risk of normalising reactionary ideologies that take root all too easily in society. Ever since Garrett Hardin’s lifeboat analogy laid the foundations of ecofascism, it has been clear that scarcity pairs well with competition, cruelty, hoarding, and the perceived right to defend one’s threatened living space. As Carl Amery was the first to point out – followed more recently by authors such as Andreas Malm and Bruno Latour – the rise of the new far right is inseparable from pre-emptive reactions to an ecologically saturated world, one where supremacists would rather kill than share.3

Transforming our countries into renewable electrostates must be the number one goal of any ecosocialist programme.

But apart from its political dangers, the Malthusian approach also has epistemological flaws – or, at the very least, it is confusingly open to interpretation when applied to specific historical situations. This is particularly true in a modern world-system of intensely interdependent global human networks, driven by unprecedented technological, economic, and scientific dynamism. While some maintain that the “Malthusian trap” persists in industrial civilisation, evidence has repeatedly disproved their warnings: Malthus himself was refuted, as were his intellectual successors, by the “population bomb” of the 1960s and Hubbert’s peak oil theories, which predicted the imminent decline of oil in the 2000s. Malthusian environmentalism’s predictions tend to be disproved because, while natural resources are limited, they are also unknown and dynamic. The resources we use in any given historical context are a combination of our planet’s material potential, variable economic incentives, and technological developments.

However, there is another environmental philosophy which has freed itself from Malthusianism’s problematic political and scientific influences, while also conserving some of its core truths. This current – which we can broadly call ecological modernisation – has often been scorned by the Left for its seeming collaboration with capitalist goals like sustainable development. It should not, however, be confused with its more extreme counterpart, ecomodernism, which advocates instead for a very particular form of radical Promethean modernisation, rejecting the precautionary principle in favour of technologies such as nuclear power, geoengineering, and transgenesis.

We can think of society’s metabolism like that of an organism: it ingests materials and energy (input) from its surroundings and excretes waste and alterations (output) into its environment. Malthusianism and modernisation disagree not only in how much they trust or distrust technology, but also on what stage of social metabolism is subject to ecological limits. Malthusianism identifies the input as the weak link, interpreting unsustainability as scarcity, whether in the form of shortages or exhausted supplies. Modernisation points to the output, viewing the limit as saturation: carbon sinks overwhelmed by pollution, and destroyed or disrupted ecosystem functions. This difference matters. Politically speaking, the first leads us to view sustainability as a forced reduction in human demand (or even population) in the face of dwindling natural resources, and the future as a zero-sum or negative-sum material game. The second leads to a radical redesign of our socio-ecological metabolism and technosphere, compatible with the promise of progress as a positive-sum material game.

Caught between a return to a classical, ecologically blind abundance agenda and neo-Malthusian environmentalism that refuses to offer the people an aspirational material vision, ecosocialism requires a push towards a third option: a left-wing version of ecological modernisation that champions abundance within planetary boundaries. This ceases to sound like an oxymoron when we consider that, at this very moment, productive forces are undergoing a genuine revolution that is, in its content, origins, and potential, worthy of the label “ecological”.

An ecological revolution

Thanks to Marx’s famous, oft-quoted prologue to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, a segment of Marxist thought has erroneously granted productive forces an almost automatic sense of historical agency. However, as philosopher César Rendueles argues, there is something about this tradition which, without any deterministic illusions, values the analyses of the social sciences and is politically worth championing: productive forces persistently condition both our relationship to the biosphere and the possibility of social organising. This can be both restrictive and empowering. The concept of productive forces is not, of course, simply another way of referring to technology, but a socially structured, politically oriented, and disputed understanding of it. This nuance is vital because the biggest historical impacts of productive forces were not the result of technology alone – they were rooted in its widespread adoption and through deliberate deployment and politically driven economies of scale.

Today, humanity stands on the threshold of three revolutions in productive forces that will expand the anthropological sphere, with potentially disruptive impacts on its evolution. Two of these deserve the title of “ecological” because they bring the goal of sustainability within reach while also increasing productivity – even when measured in environmentally and socially destructive capitalist terms. Both were also born of ecological movements: first the renewable energy revolution, and second, the regenerative agriculture movement. The third revolution, the digital-cognitive, is not inherently ecological – it could theoretically be deployed in such a way, but could also become another vector for contemporary devastation of the natural world.

From the earliest days of computing to the internet, AI, and robotics, the digital-cognitive revolution has commanded outsized attention, what Rendueles calls a kind of “cyberfetishism”.4 The Left has had a somewhat manic-depressive relationship with this technology, oscillating between the edenic naivety of the 1990s and present-day doomerism. Without a doubt, the fears that it raises in 2026 are justified by trends such as technofeudalism, surveillance capitalism, and tech’s contribution to 21st-century fascism. But these productive forces are also subjects to be debated. As authors like Aaron Bastani and Paul Cockshott have highlighted, their rise could offer huge opportunities for socialist causes in terms of economic and democratic planning and streamlining workflows: a literal communist “abundance” in exchange for little to no money. However, if the material abundance of the future is to be environmentally sustainable, then free digital information will never be more than an auxiliary – only a different relationship with the earth and energy can guarantee it.

This is what the regenerative agriculture and electro-renewable revolutions enable. The former combines traditional farming knowledge with cutting-edge science, and is revealing to us that soil, far from being an inert medium, is one of the Earth’s most complex ecosystems. Replacing practices that damage its structure with those that restore it can successfully maintain or even increase industrial agricultural productivity, while simultaneously restoring its fertility. It promises an encouraging evolutionary shift: to restart the Neolithic era and redirect primary biomass production towards restoring the richness of our ecosystems.

But renewables hold the key to a programme of abundance within planetary boundaries. The falling cost of photovoltaic and wind energy, as well as energy storage, is one of the most spectacular changes in economic history, and its rollout is progressing with unprecedented speed. China took 16 years to build the Three Gorges Dam, but in 2025 it installed solar panels with a similar capacity every three weeks. This energy acceleration is not limited to China. Pakistan, India, Kenya, and Vietnam demonstrate that one of the great virtues of the renewable energy revolution is that it will not be monopolistic, but distributed. This opens up a historic opportunity for autonomous development in the Global South.

This is unlike any other energy transition. In most of the world, there is currently no cheaper way to produce electricity than pointing a solar panel at the sky. More than any previous energy transition, the process closely resembles the introduction of microprocessors: a radical levelling that allowed billions of people to carry in their pockets a computer a million times more powerful than those used in the Apollo space programme.

What is happening today with solar energy and batteries is a similar evolutionary leap to the discovery of fire. To paraphrase Marx, we are on the cusp of leaving behind humanity’s prehistorical era of energy production, i.e. burning things. Over the coming decades we will stop regularly burning the molecules created by photosynthesis – whether biomass or fossil fuels – that have ruled our energy systems for a million years, and will enter a new world of unimaginable efficiency and abundance. We will use the free gift of sunlight to move electrons ourselves.

The Left should focus on politically challenging the energy transition in order to harness it in the service of an ecologically rigorous and socially inclusive modernisation.

To this we can add the fact that – thanks to the superior efficiency of electricity over fossil fuels – it is both technically and economically viable for us to electrify around 70 per cent of our material processes, offering a sovereignty, security, and democratising potential that goes far beyond the hypothetical. If we can grasp this, then we already know that transforming our countries into renewable electrostates must be the number one goal of any ecosocialist programme.

Degrowth environmentalism has questioned renewable energy’s ability to ensure a future of abundance through various arguments. The purely technological ones made some sense 15 or 20 years ago, but have now been empirically disproved. Objections regarding impacts on biodiversity are valid, but experience has also shown that renewable energy can be integrated with agriculture and ecosystems. When well managed, it can even enhance biodiversity by, for instance, restoring native vegetation beneath and between solar panels. Furthermore, mineral constraints do not jeopardise the viability of the transition where it matters most: renewable generation, grids, and storage. These are not especially mineral-intensive technologies, and are recyclable. However, it is doubtful whether we could electrify every single vehicle in existence, thus replicating the existing model in an electric version. Here, the bottleneck – at least with current technology – lies with batteries, not to mention that the current model of privatising public space for the benefit of the car has disastrous social effects that ecosocialism must combat.

The energy transition will, of course, expand the mining industry, but it is worth clearing up a misconception that degrowth has helped to spread: rolling out all of the infrastructure needed for decarbonisation over the next 25 years will require fewer minerals than just one year of fossil energy. Though this figure may seem surprising, it has a simple explanation: fossil fuel extraction produces outputs that are continuously burned. Once extracted and processed, metal minerals remain incorporated in the system’s capital as products with a long useful life, and they can also be recycled.5

New mines will undoubtedly open as a result of the green transition, and these processes may, depending on how they are handled politically, be violent and extractivist. But they could also be beneficial. The key lies in challenging them. The same happens with new renewables: if deployed under a capitalist logic, renewables in many areas exacerbate wealth accumulation via dispossession in the name of green progress, and provoke legitimate resistance.

But the ecosocialist’s job cannot be to simply question the widespread rollout of renewables, because this, however inadvertently, places them on the side of the fossil fuel industry. Instead, the Left should focus on politically challenging the energy transition in order to harness it in the service of an ecologically rigorous and socially inclusive modernisation. We can adopt the same kind of proactive, modernising political shift when it comes to issues relating to extractivism. Rather than flatly rejecting extractive processes when they could work against the fossil-fuel model, the ecosocialist left could approach them from the perspective of a new form of popular development. This would place the recovery of material sovereignty on the agenda, but take it beyond classical resource nationalism through strict conditions on investor access linked to technology transfer, cooperative trade frameworks, and the development of endogenous industrial policies.

Our generational mission is to harness capital so that, within 25 years, we can decarbonise the world, fully electrify the global productive structure, and distribute this new source of collective wealth equitably.

Ecosocialism for the masses

While new productive forces are broadening the horizons of ecosocialism with promises of newfound abundance, they do not eliminate the threat of the ecological crisis. We are faced with catastrophic shifts in the world’s climate that urgently require us to slow down, while also demanding a herculean effort to adapt – one which we are failing dismally to make. We continue to wipe out species at an unprecedented rate, and to self-destructively erode vital ecosystem functions. We also continue to exceed seven of the nine planetary boundaries: in 2025 we added ocean acidification to the six already identified (climate change, erosion of biosphere integrity, land system change, excess global freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, and novel entities).

The energy and regenerative transitions are the cornerstones of an ecological transformation of industrial metabolism. They can ensure its long-term viability, but they are not the only pieces of the puzzle. We also need a genuinely circular economy, with far-reaching ramifications, ranging from a new critical mineral recycling industry to a complete redesign of all production processes, including the abolition of strategies like planned obsolescence, which exist only to maximise capitalist profit margins. We need to ingrain various forms of consumption in society, starting with transport. We must also transform practices that are not, and will never be, sustainable in any conceivable scenario of ecological abundance, such as consumerism, throwaway culture, and the unprecedented dominance of meat in the contemporary diet.

None of these changes is easily compatible with neoliberal capitalism – even less so if we also aspire, as the Left should, to an ecological transition that is swift and just. These two features can only come in tandem. If the transition is not just, it cannot be quick, because grassroots opposition will hamper any changes. The reverse is also true; if it is not quick enough, it will be unjust for those most exposed to climate chaos, and for future generations who would be undeservingly condemned to a life of crushingly hostile conditions.

While renewable energy’s new competitive advantage has opened up a profitable niche that capital is already readily exploiting – ushering in a new frontier of accumulation, with all the social upheaval that this entails – ecosocialism’s work cannot consist of holding back this technological change. On the contrary, we must accelerate it through public control, and place it in the service of the common good. Our generational mission is to harness capital so that, within 25 years, we can decarbonise the world, fully electrify the global productive structure, and distribute this new source of collective wealth equitably. Although this may sound provocative, in this historical context of resurgent imperialism, with petrocapitalism morphing into fossil-fuelled fascism in petrostates (such as the US) that dictate the world order, green capitalism is not our main enemy. What is private today can be socialised tomorrow, but a “Hothouse Earth” scenario is irreversible: it would be an anthropological failure, one that would make life extremely harsh for countless future generations of humankind.

The chance to reconcile future abundance with planetary boundaries is perhaps the best news of the century.

Abundance within planetary limits is not some new, technologically enabled time extension that will allow us to continue the same ecocidal patterns that have made the Anthropocene an evolutionary dead-end. It does, however, offer a chance to radically transform our socio-natural relationship with political agendas that could – in contrast to the self-containment of Malthusian environmentalism – lead to a scientifically founded horizon of sustainability that actually appeals to the average person. This is ultimately why it is worth politically exploring the idea of abundance within planetary limits: it offers tangible benefits for political action. Climate action “for the people” will not result from an ontological shift or the moral equivalent of religious conversion; we will build it by challenging the “common sense” of our current anthropological moment, with all its fears, hopes, illusions, expectations, and politically calculated rules.

In a way, the chance to reconcile future abundance with planetary boundaries – thanks to the possibilities offered by an ecosocialist harnessing of new green productive forces – is perhaps the best news of the century. Despite an entrenched (and more than reasonable) sense of catastrophic doubt, we know today that a destabilised climate and biosphere have not, in historical terms, brought to an end what Marx taught us to call the Realm of Freedom. And if there has ever been a goal that works in our favour – one capable of uniting vast numbers of people and forging the sort of collective spirit needed to weather the many trials and tribulations along the way – it is this.

This article first appeared in Nueva Sociedad 323 / August 2026 in Spanish. It was translated by the Guerrilla Media Collective and is republished here with permission, with minor edits.

1. Jason Hickel: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, Random House, 2020; Adrián Almazán and Luis González Reyes: Decrecimiento. Del qué al cómo, Barcelona, Icaria, 2023.  ︎
2. Ernest García: Ecología e igualdad, Valencia, Tirant Humanidades, 2021.    ︎
3. Carl Amery: Auschwitz, ¿comienza el siglo XXI? Hitler como precursor, Madrid-Ciudad de México, Turner / fce, 2002.  ︎
4. César Rendueles: Sociophobia: Political Change in the Digital Utopia, Columbia University Press, 2017.  ︎
5. For a broad, exhaustive overview of advances in electro-renewables that speaks from a position of both activist compromise and academic rigour, see, Daniel Carralero, Marta Victoria and Cristóbal Gallego: Un lugar al que llegar. Mapa político de la transición energética, Madrid, Levanta Fuego, 2025.  ︎

Declassified documents reveal that, prior to the crossing of over 70,000 people from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in July, Spain’s intelligence services had passed a warning to Rabat. Still, Morocco let it happen, demonstrating once again that border externalisation exposes Europe to the whims of autocrats and leads to needless death and suffering. What can Spain and the EU learn from Ceuta?

Between the morning of 30 July and the evening of 31 July 2026, more than 70,000 people crossed into Ceuta, a Spanish city of 80,000 inhabitants on the North African coast, bordering Morocco. It was the largest single breach of the European Union’s external border on record.

At 1:52 pm on 29 July, an officer of Spain’s National Intelligence Centre in Ceuta informed the office of the government’s delegate in the city that calls were circulating online for a crossing “by fence and by sea” the following evening, on Morocco’s Throne Day. Facebook groups behind the call had around 180,000 members between them. That same day, the intelligence service alerted Morocco’s two intelligence agencies, the DGST and the DGED, and asked for their cooperation in stopping the plan.

We know all this thanks to 40 internal documents that the Spanish government later released, under pressure from both parliament and the courts. Yet the following morning, gendarmes on the beaches near Fnideq stood aside as tens of thousands of people – overwhelmingly young Moroccans – walked into the sea. At least 141 died, most of them in the sea off the Tarajal breakwater.

Within 72 hours, roughly 90 per cent of those who survived were back in Morocco. Most of them returned voluntarily, in cooperation with Rabat. Several thousand remained, among them more than 1,000 unaccompanied minors, who under Spanish law cannot be returned without a verified family placement, and applicants for asylum, whose removal is suspended until their claim has been assessed. Rabat has demanded that the minors be handed over.

Whether Moroccan authorities directed the crossing rather than merely failing to stop it remains contested. Pedro Sánchez told parliament on 3 September that during “the 10 central hours” of 30 July the Moroccan gendarmerie “permitted the crossing”, while maintaining that no proof had been offered that Morocco designed or executed the operation. But that is not the question that matters most. A state that polices its northern coast as tightly as Morocco does, and that two weeks later swiftly blocked a new online call to cross into Ceuta, does not just lose control for 10 hours by chance.

By design or by omission, the Moroccan state is responsible for the 141 people who died in the water. But other choices, too, made this tragedy possible.

A European failure

Two policy failures converged in Ceuta – one European, one Spanish.

The European policy in question is border externalisation. Since the agreement with Turkey in 2016, the EU has paid third countries to hold people back from its borders and has treated what happens to those people as a matter for the jurisdiction concerned. Libya in 2017, Morocco in 2019, Tunisia in 2023, Mauritania and Egypt in 2024; and now the Pact on Migration and Asylum, which extends the model rather than questioning it. Morocco receives more European border funding than any other state in North Africa.

Progressive forces have opposed this arrangement on humanitarian grounds for a decade. The countries the EU designates as safe are not safe for the people held in them, as the documented record of torture, rape, and abandonment in the desert makes plain. Moreover, defending the right to seek a life elsewhere means refusing to see people turned into a commodity exchanged between governments.

But Ceuta also exposes a second flaw in the model, one that governments indifferent to the first may find harder to ignore. Every externalisation agreement transfers to a third state a measure of control over the foreign policy of the state that pays. Turkey demonstrated this at the Greek border in 2020. Belarus demonstrated it against Poland and Lithuania in 2021. Morocco has now demonstrated it twice in five years, the second time on a scale seven or eight times larger than the first.

The EU believed it had purchased control over its external borders. What it has actually acquired is a set of dependencies, one per neighbour, each exercisable at that neighbour’s convenience.

Spain’s responsibilities

Spain, for its part, has pursued appeasement, attempting to secure a difficult neighbour’s goodwill through unilateral concession.

Morocco has used the border with Ceuta and Melilla as an instrument of pressure for decades. In 2002, it occupied Perejil, an uninhabited island close to the Moroccan coast but under Spanish sovereignty. In 2018, on the eve of Throne Day, it let several hundred people storm the Ceuta fence. In May 2021, after the leader of the Polisario Front – a Sahrawi nationalist liberation movement that fights for the independence of Western Sahara from Moroccan control – was admitted to a hospital in Spain under a false identity, some 10,000 people entered Ceuta in under three days while Moroccan police looked on.

Spain did not respond by reducing its exposure. Instead, in March 2022, Sánchez sent an official letter to King Mohammed VI endorsing Morocco’s Autonomy Plan for Western Sahara, reversing half a century of Spanish neutrality over the decolonisation of its former colony and doing so without a parliamentary debate and without consulting the coalition partner then in government. In June that year, at least 23 migrants and asylum seekers died in a crowd crush at the fence in Melilla – Spain’s other city on the North African coast – on the Moroccan side of the border, as Moroccan and Spanish security forces moved to repel a mass crossing.

Four years on, the customs posts at Ceuta and Melilla still do not operate normally, and Spain and Morocco have not resolved their airspace dispute. That concession taught Rabat that pressure at the border produces results.

In August this year, Morocco’s justice minister, a royal appointee, went on state television to claim Rabat’s “historic and geographic right” over Ceuta and Melilla, demanding a bilateral commission on their “return to the homeland”. In September, responding to the documents declassified by the Spanish government, Morocco’s foreign minister, Nasser Bourita, issued a statement accusing Spanish politicians and media of “strategic blindness”, warning that this would produce “recurring tensions”, and reminding Madrid that “geographic proximity is an immutable fact”. The two cities have since featured in Morocco’s parliamentary election campaign.

Yet until the hours preceding this summer’s crisis, the Spanish state still trusted Morocco to act on its warnings that a crossing was being organised. Madrid’s posture was to fully rely on the goodwill of a neighbour that had already used the border against it, five years earlier, to extract the largest foreign policy concession in decades – and to double down on a policy that had already caused unnecessary deaths.

Responsibility for this failure lies with Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE). Sumar, the junior coalition partner of which I am a member, has warned for years that the relationship built since 2022 would produce a tragedy like this summer’s. After 30 July, it has repeated in parliament that Spain suffered an attack in which people in extreme vulnerability were used as the instrument, that the explanation attributing the crossing to smuggling networks is not credible, and that the response was belated and inadequate. It has done so not with the intention to bring down the government, but to change the policy.

The reticence of the Socialist side is structural rather than personal. To name Morocco’s responsibility is to concede that the 2022 concession bought nothing. A government that builds its regional policy on keeping a neighbour appeased loses the capacity to criticise that neighbour’s actions. Five weeks passed before Sánchez addressed parliament. The summoning of the Moroccan embassy’s representative on 21 August was kept secret for two weeks, while similar episodes in disputes with Israel, Italy, and Argentina were widely publicised. The prime minister’s most recent formulation is that he “exculpates no one” and will act “with the utmost firmness” if solid proof emerges. Morocco, for its part, has informed Madrid that it is conducting its own investigation. It has not said who is conducting it or when it will report back.

Why Europe did not help

Madrid’s reticence explains why no case for European solidarity was made, but does not justify how the EU and some of its member states reacted.

On 31 July, Italy’s right-wing government threatened to suspend Schengen with Spain and blamed the deaths on Spain’s extraordinary regularisation of undocumented migrants, a process opened in January which had drawn more than 800,000 applications by July. No emergency Council was called. The Treaty’s solidarity clause was not invoked. A member state had suffered a breach of its external border on a scale never seen before, and the response from the other capitals was silence.

The reasons are not hard to find. Spain recognised the state of Palestine in 2024, has been the most outspoken European voice on Gaza, has declined to make its bases fully available for offensive operations in the US war on Iran, and has decided to regularise migrants rather than deporting them. For many European powers and for the US, these count as serious transgressions.

In the months before the crossing, several of Spain’s allies moved closer to Rabat. On 15 July, two weeks before the mass crossing, the US House of Representatives passed the State Department funding bill for 2027. The report the Appropriations Committee had published in April to accompany it described Ceuta and Melilla as “administered by Spain” but “located in Moroccan territory”, remaining “the subject of Morocco’s longstanding claim”. It also endorsed State Department efforts to facilitate dialogue on their future status. The report carries no legal force, and its sponsor has since described the wording as purely geographical. Still, it was the first time the US Congress put the Moroccan claim in writing.

Moreover, on 7 August, hours after taking office, Colombia’s new president, pro-Trump right-winger Abelardo de la Espriella, recognised Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in the presence of Morocco’s foreign minister, and three days later recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which international law considers part of Syria. Morocco is Israel’s closest military partner in North Africa. No coordination needs to be alleged for these facts to matter: aligned interests move in the same direction without a masterplan.

The Spanish Right has managed to play both sides. The right-wing Partido Popular (PP) and the far-right Vox spent the first days of the crisis in studied ambiguity, then rounded on Rabat, accusing Morocco of organising the crossing and Sánchez of covering for it. At the same time, they demanded the immediate return of the people who crossed, and said nothing about the US report on the “future status” of the two exclaves.

Severity towards those in the water, deference towards the governments backing the state that put them there: that combination is not a Spanish peculiarity, and progressives elsewhere in Europe will recognise it in their own opposition.

Another way forward

Spain, and the EU with it, built a border policy on the assumption that a neighbouring autocracy would act in their interest, and that assumption has now failed at a cost of 141 lives. What replaces that policy must start from a different premise.

The first needed change concerns the bilateral relationship. Every Spanish government has accepted that Morocco’s capacity to cause harm makes a working relationship necessary, and that is a reasonable starting point. But there is a difference between maintaining a relationship and organising an entire regional policy around keeping the neighbour placated. A relationship with Rabat that can survive Ceuta must rest on reciprocity that can be verified and consequences that can be enforced: accountability for 30 July before ministerial contacts resume at their previous level, auditable conditions on border cooperation, and diversification of Spain’s regional ties so that no single neighbour holds a veto.

There have been steps in the right direction: Sánchez visited Algiers in July to mend a diplomatic rift around Western Sahara, and on 10 September, the Spanish parliament approved a law extending nationality to Sahrawis born in the territory before August 1977, when the option to claim Spanish nationality granted at the end of colonial rule expired. However positive, these steps are not yet a policy.

The second necessary change is European. When Belarus pushed people towards the Polish and Lithuanian borders in 2021, the EU called it a hybrid attack, imposed sanctions on Minsk, and adjusted its legal framework accordingly. Applying the same standard to Morocco is the minimum. Beyond that, every externalisation agreement in force should be reopened to attach conditions and consequences, because funding without them amounts to a retainer rather than cooperation.

More fundamentally, the EU should reconsider its outsourcing model. That means offering safe routes that people can use without crossing a sea or a fence: work and family-reunification visas issued in countries of origin at a scale that corresponds to actual demand rather than to political tolerance; the possibility of applying for protection at European consulates and through humanitarian corridors, so that the right to asylum does not depend on surviving the journey; and mobility agreements negotiated with the countries migrants come from, as partners with interests of their own, rather than with the transit states through which they are pushed.

A shared European system of reception and relocation that does not leave the state where people first arrive to manage the consequences alone is also needed, alongside asylum procedures that take weeks rather than years, and the regularisation of those already present, because an undocumented population is the raw material of every form of exploitation. None of this is quick or cheap, but it removes the dependency at the root: a route that does not run through Morocco is a route Morocco cannot open or close.

The third change concerns the people at the fence. Treating the migrants as the threat shifts the responsibility away from the actors who sent them. The far right across Europe supplies that narrative, in Spain with demands for immediate pushbacks, and elsewhere with the argument that people used as a weapon may be handled as one. The two interests converge at the fence, and each relies on the other to keep the argument there. Refusing that argument is the only coherent answer. The people who crossed into Ceuta on 30 July have rights that do not depend on why they crossed, and a border policy that does not begin from that fact ends by rewarding the state that used them.

These three changes are not in tension. Defending the people who cross borders and defending the borders’ integrity are the same task. Any policy that does not recognise this is a recipe for more tragedies and blackmail by autocratic powers.

Freefalling agricultural yields, severe health problems due to rampant pollution, and livelihoods that have to be built anew: these are the daily realities of residents in India’s automotive manufacturing hub of Pune, where producers have for years disregarded environmental safeguards. And despite regulations mandating supply chain due diligence, components made in the region still make their way into the vehicles of Europe’s biggest carmakers. A Follow the Money investigation.

For 30-year-old Nilesh Mandikar, living in toxicity has become the norm. Sitting in his two-room home near Pune city, a three-hour drive from India’s Mumbai, he gestures at a sewage pipe discharging into an open plot some six metres away.  

“I had to stop cultivating fruits, grains, [seeds], and vegetables,” he says. “The soil at my plot degraded because of water pollution.” 

A foul smell lingers in the air; litres of green-white, foamy wastewater slurp from a big underground pipe into the open agricultural plot.  

Mandikar lives in Ambethan, an area part of a buzzing hub of multiple factories that are polluting the area. They produce components for cars that, an investigation by FTM shows, are then sent to Europe, where automakers – including Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, and Renault, amongst others – assemble them into their vehicles.   

While Europe is racing for a cleaner environment and is increasingly betting on electric vehicles, its car production has severe consequences in India, the investigation reveals. Having analysed data points on global trade data platform Panjiva, FTM identified more than 1,000 export shipments from three factories in Pune to Europe between April 2020 and February 2025. 

The shipments included, for example, electrical connectors, metal bars, or rots for the gearbox – key components for both electric vehicles and combustion engine cars.  

For Mandikar, the pollution had life-changing consequences. With failed harvests having become more regular, Mandikar has stopped farming over the past few years. He now works as a driver, earning some 280 euros a month. And he’s not the only one: almost 90 per cent of the farmers in the village have stopped farming due to similar reasons. 

This, like days when hundreds of dead fish floated dead in a river in the region, has sparked protests across the region, with hundreds of people gathering in front of the local municipalities multiple times a year – but with limited effect. Factories seem to keep flouting environmental rules.  

“Manufacturing companies and public administrations on both sides of the chain must fulfil their obligation to enforce environmental and labour regulations,” said Claudia Bosch, head of the Fair Electronics campaign, which advocates for ethical supply chains. “A change of model is needed, one that guarantees environmental protections and, consequently, the protection of affected local communities throughout the value chain, whether for electric or combustion vehicles.” 

Toxic waters  

Dubbed the “motor city”, Chakan city is the country’s largest automobile and manufacturing hub in the sprawling metropolitan region of Pune. It is home to some 40,000 inhabitants and over 750 factories. The world’s biggest car brands, like Mercedes and Volkswagen, have their own factories there. Even more carmakers source their components from subsidiary factories.  

Residents in Ambethan, the village in Chakan where Mandikar lives, see few benefits. They attribute much of the visible pollution – think water, air, soil, crops – to factories around them.  

“Continuous noise and air pollution from factories cause constant health issues,” Mandikar said, adding that these ranged from headaches and skin allergies to waterborne diseases. 

Balasaheb Padwal, another resident, echoed the assessment. 

“Sites of industrial waste being burnt [in the open] or heaps of plastic of polluted and colourful, smelly liquid being discharged openly into drains or in open plots are common,” he said. 

Amphenol Company that manufactures EV componets discharges waste water in open drainage in Bhosari in Pune. © Varsha Torgalkar 

Groundwater is yellow, and even a representative of the local governing body, who requested anonymity due to fear of repercussions, said he accepted that it’s no longer drinkable. 

Local residents FTM spoke to said that they used to get 2.5 tonnes of peanuts from one acre just a few years ago – now, they could only get 10 to 20 kilogrammes, they said – a fall of more than 99 per cent.  

Motherson Sumi factory is part of the industrial hub in the area and situated in Ambethan. A billboard at its factory gate claims that its pollutant levels are within permissible levels – but that doesn’t seem to reflect reality: its wastewater exceeds toxicity limits.  

Reporters collected untreated sewage samples from the location where Motherson Sumi factory discharges its wastewater for Follow the Money and sent it to a lab. The test shows chemical oxygen demand (COD) of more than 2,200 mg/l – several times above the legal maximum of 600mg/l for water discharged into a public sewer, or 250 mg/l for inland surface water. COD measures how fast contaminants in the water can be gotten rid of, meaning that high levels of COD indicate higher levels of pollution. Similarly, the water’s biochemical oxygen demand – which measures specific pollutants such as pesticides and industrial chemicals – is almost double the legal limit.  

The building of village local body at Ambethan in Chakan of Pune. Mothersonsumi in Ambethan pollutes fertile soil land. © Varsha Torgalkar 

Shailaja Deshpande, environmental expert and the founder and director of Jivitnadi Living River Foundation which works to protect rivers in Pune, said that the heavy metals shown in the lab results were “directly connected to the food chain and extremely dangerous” for human health and aquatic life.  

“The raw sewage and soil reports are not only alarming but scary,” she said. “Both results convey that the water and soil both are extremely contaminated and not only harmful to humans, aquatic and terrestrial life but will be retained in water and soils for longer periods.” 

Motherson Sumi declined to comment. 

The situation doesn’t look much better in other parts of the Pune region.  

About an hour’s drive further south sits the Amphenol factory. There, the factory seems to be discharging untreated wastewater into open drains, which flow into the Indrayani and Pavana rivers. A lab analysis shows that the soil surrounding the factory contains heavy metals cadmium and nickel – both above safe limits under Indian law.  

© Varsha Torgalkar 

The two metals are highly toxic and pollute the environment, including agricultural land and water. Cadmium can also carry severe health consequences, such as renal dysfunction, bone demineralisation and respiratory problems. Nickel, meanwhile, can cause cardiovascular diseases and respiratory issues and increases the risk of cancer.  

Since it doesn’t corrode easily, cadmium was widely used for steel plating; because of its toxicity, it is heavily regulated in some parts of the world and carmakers have switched to alternatives. However, it is still being used in electrical connectors and some specialised coating, for example. It rapidly seeps into groundwater and accumulates in the food chain.  

Nickel, meanwhile, is used to produce batteries for electric vehicles, as well as to build wheel components and spark plugs, amongst others.   

Both rivers into which untreated wastewater gets discharged supply drinking water to over 5 million people, and irrigate hectares of agricultural land that provides food to millions.  

Nickel and cadmium levels are elevated across the region and exceed safe thresholds in vegetables such as spinach and cauliflower, a 2025 study found.  

Prashant Raul, an activist who runs an environment collective in Pune, warned of the long-term consequences.  

“Farmers cultivate crops in toxic soils with polluted water and consume poisonous food,” he said. “The percentage of diseases caused by pollution, like cancer, is highest in India.”  

In Dhayarkar Colony, near the Bharat Forge factory further south in Pune city itself, residents complain of similar issues.  

With the factories in the vicinity dumping their wastewater into the surrounding fields without a proper drainage system being in place, an unpleasant odour hangs in the air – and the freestanding water seems to carry its own health risks.  

Not far from the Bharat Forge factory, Abhijit Gaikwad is frustrated.  

The 37-year old activist sees that even groundwater extracted from deep underground is polluted, carrying a yellow and black colour. While residents didn’t drink the water, they still had to use it for washing their clothes and bathing, he said. 

“Residents have to use [that water] every day,” he said. Other residents in the area complained of the same issue.  

This hasn’t gone unnoticed by authorities.  

In 2021, the region’s pollution control authority MPCB asked Bharat Forge, given irregularities in the factory’s measures to prevent pollution, why the “unit shall not be directed to close down the manufacturing activity”, and instructed to file a corrective action plan within a week. 

Activist Abhijit Gaikwad and local residents with a letter of complaint against Bharat Forge to submit to Maharashtra Pollution Control Board. © Varsha Torgalkar 

The warning, obtained by FTM through Freedom of Information requests, found that oil was being discharged in open water outside the factory, and that the sewage treatment was not working at full capacity.  

Three years later, however, the factory was still operating – and received more warnings. In April 2024, the same control authority issued a warning notice to the factory, reprimanding it for showing “negligence towards pollution control and environment protection”.  

“You are therefore instructed to submit [a report on] your action taken … within 7 days,” the control board warned.  

Yet, half a year later, the control board sent another letter to Bharat Forge, asking it to submit details of how its oil was being stored on the premises. And in early 2025, the authority issued yet another warning – this time about complaints about noise and air pollution in the residential area surrounding the factory.  

For activist Gaikwad, who has been sounding the alarm about the pollution for years, the fact that Bharat Forge is still operating shows the lack of teeth the control board has.  

Even if factories are found to be violating the country’s environmental laws, enforcement is inconsistent. For manufacturers, risking fines is often less costly than compliance. Proper wastewater treatment often costs hundreds of thousands of euros. And while environmental penalties could, in theory, be expensive, they are rarely enforced, and barely any closure orders are issued.  

Palak Balyan, research lead at Delhi-based environmental organisation Climate Trends said that “industry in India is a huge contributor of particulate matter and other kinds of pollution”.  

Manufacturers were discharging heated, toxic wastewater that harmed the flora and fauna, he said.  

“They also emit fumes that cause air pollution, ultimately affecting human health and contributing to global warming,” he said. “This pollution also increases heat and affects the ozone layer. This industrial pollution, proven through research, causes severe health issues like diabetes, water-borne diseases, and cardiovascular diseases, among others.” 

Europe-bound 

From Pune, the components are sent to Europe to be assembled into vehicles. FTM tracked components, such as gear parts, electronic connectors, wiring harnesses, and other  vehicle modules that likely ended up in the supply chain of Audi, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Volkswagen.  

An analysis of trade data shows that  987 shipments from Pune – from Motherson Sumi, Bharat Forge, and Amphenol – to Spain between April 2020 and February 2025, with a combined declared value of approximately $24.5 million, according to Panjiva customs data.  

About a third of them went to the automotive cluster in the northwestern region of Aragon, which includes around 300 companies; some of them are based near Zaragoza city. It is one of the country’s leading manufacturing hubs.  

Motherson Sumi has a subsidiary in the hub: SMR Automotive Systems Spain. That subsidiary, in turn, supplies a bigger European automotive sector. The subsidiary owns two assembly and manufacturing plants in northern Spain: SMP Ibérica SLU, in Palencia, and SMP Automotive Technologies, in Teruel. Electronic components are sent from Pune to produce exterior and interior mirrors, and vehicle modules for Audi, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Volkswagen. The supply programmes include regular, electric, and hybrid cars. Its main customers in Spain are Ford, PSA, Renault, Seat, and Volkswagen. 

Bharat Forge also sends parts to Aragon. It supplies Zaragoza-based Dana Automocion S.A., a leading manufacturer of technologies that makes components, parts, and systems that transmit engine power to the wheels, enabling both traditional and electrified cars to move. Dana Automocion, in turn, supplies Stellantis Zaragoza, according to a Spain-based industry expert. That factory produces cars for Peugeot, Lancia, and Opel.  

Waste water discharged by Amephenol flows in this open public drainage system that runs in the river. © Varsha Torgalkar 

The factory also sends shipments to Etxetar S.A., from which General Motors and Jaguar buy assemblies, and works  with Volkswagen, Volvo, and Ford. 

Amphenol, meanwhile, ships components to several Spanish distributors with a value of almost 6.5 million euros between April 2020 and February 2025. From there, these parts are likely to end in the supply chains of big European brands.  

Mercedes-Benz Spain and Audi told FTM that they are asking suppliers about the case. No other car company or brand responded to requests for comment. 

Another route through which components produced in Pune reach Europe is Morocco.  

Motherson Sumi also has a subsidiary – the Samvardhana Motherson Reydel Autotecc Morocco – in Tangier. There, it manufactures interior modules for Renault cars. The Motherson Sumi factory in Pune sent components to its branch in Morocco until at least mid-2022. The vast majority of Renault’s Morocco output is exported to Europe. 

In total, FTM traced more than 1,000 exports of components from Pune to Spain and Morocco from April 2020 to April 2025.  

Green promises 

The discovery comes amid pledges by the world’s biggest companies to invest in greener technology. 

Stellantis, for example, says on its website that it is aiming to have “a broad positive impact on the environment”.  

This, the company says, also applies to its suppliers. “Our strategy consists in selecting suppliers according to environmental criteria … or their ability to develop products which incorporate green or recycled materials,” the firm says. 

In a similar vein, Renault insists that “compliance with social and environmental requirements is part of both the supplier selection process and supplier relations”. 

And Volkswagen declared that all suppliers underwent a risk analysis, with environmental and human rights being key aspects. “These criteria are mandatory and binding,” a spokesperson for Volkswagen said in an interview. 

But having criteria doesn’t necessarily mean that firms can wash their hands of responsibility for environmental harm in their supply chain. 

Under the German supply chain law, in force since 2023, companies with more than 1,000 employees have to identify and prevent human rights and environmental violations in their supply chains.  

This means that German companies like Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen have to make sure that when they buy components from factories or middlemen, environmental laws are respected if they impact human rights.  

And that goes beyond simply asking suppliers to promise they are respecting the standards or relying on compliance signs posted at factory gates, says Finn Schufft, a policy advisor on corporate accountability at Germanwatch, an NGO that analyses environmental policies. 

“Relying on reported data by suppliers is not usually enough to meet the standards of the risk analysis required,” he said. “Where companies have reason to believe that there has been a violation, they cannot shield themselves with compliance data from suppliers, but need to take active steps to verify the information.” 

While communities can file complaints with German authorities if they believe that the companies aren’t living up to their due diligence obligations, this doesn’t seem to have yielded tangible results so far. 

“To date, the supervisory authority, to our knowledge, has refused to issue any concrete orders to companies or impose sanctions for violations of the Act,” said Schufft.  

Fair Electronics campaign’s Bosch echoed the assessment.  

“With electric vehicles, we want a just energy transition,” she said, “not a continuation of North-South inequalities or the externalisation of socio-environmental impacts on communities and territories of the Global South, as has been happening with combustion-engine vehicles”.  

Other companies that aren’t covered by German law, however, only have to abide by international law – which is less strict for environmental standards. 

A European-wide law, the corporate sustainability due diligence directive, aims to address that. It imposes similar obligations on companies with more than 5,000 employees and a net turnover of over 1.5 billion euros. 

All carmakers mentioned in this article would fall under the criteria. 

But although it entered into force in 2024, the law will only apply from 2029, and fines will be capped at 3 per cent of a firm’s net global turnover.  

For Mandikar, those laws are too little too late.  

“Common citizens like [us] who have no power except for one vote in elections cannot bring change,” he said.  

He looks at his poisoned land one last time before walking back to his home, just a stone’s throw from the discharge pipe. The factory hum never stops.  

This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe. It was originally published by Follow the Money. 

With parts of the feminist movement drifting towards personal empowerment and green actors emphasising cost of living issues, few voices remain connecting the dots between ecological and feminist struggles. Yet studies show that rising temperatures increase domestic violence, and women are more heavily impacted by food scarcity during draughts and floods. How to build counterpower at times of gender and climate backlash? Ros Taylor spoke with the author of Feminism for a World on Fire. 

When I meet Natasha Walter towards the end of August, Britain’s arid summer is at last beginning to ebb. A few drops of rain have fallen on the yellow, desiccated parks, but not enough to revive them. In the past eight weeks, north London has had just two millimetres of rain.

But the drought and wildfires barely impinge on the political round. Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, belatedly sends a text message to Britons urging them not to light unnecessary fires. His new secretary for energy security and net zero, Miatta Fahnbulleh, will open up a North Sea gas field for drilling. Her Conservative shadow, Andrew Bowie, declares himself the “energy security secretary”, dropping any reference to net zero.

As temperature records are broken, the fight seems to have gone out of Britain’s environmental movement. Perhaps they expected the proof of global heating and multiple energy crises to concentrate politicians’ minds on the green transition. If so, they were very wrong. Instead, the talk now is almost exclusively of adaptation and how to generate enough electricity for air conditioning. Even the Green Party now mainly focuses on the cost of living and overheated workplaces. This has helped them in the polls, but it has done little to keep up the pressure to phase out fossil fuels.

Climate of repression

For activists like Walter, who was arrested in 2019 at a climate protest, the sense of powerlessness is distressing. Even as the Labour party made progress on decarbonising the grid and expanded wind and solar energy, it continued to crack down hard on environmental protesters. Judges imposed long prison sentences on people blocking roads and prevented them from mentioning their motives in court, so as not to sway a jury. In 2024, nine people who were arrested on their way to a planned action at Heathrow Airport spent ten months on remand before they appeared in court. The harsh sentences have significantly reduced climate protests in the UK. The government has also designated the pro-Palestinian group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, meaning that anyone who expresses support for it is liable to be prosecuted for a criminal offence.

“I feel so angry about it,” Walter says. “I really feel that there was a possibility when the first wave of climate activism was happening. You know, around 2018, a lot of people were taking to the streets. It was disruptive, [though] it wasn’t terribly disruptive to most people’s everyday lives. And I think it brought a lot of people together. It coalesced a sort of sense of urgency, and the community around that urgency.”

“And I think that some mainstream political parties on the left or towards the left could have done a lot more to connect with that energy, to learn from why people were coming out, and actually to support that energy and work with those desires to find ways forward. I find it really so baffling. And I feel so angry with this Labour government.”

She admits some of the actions “weren’t brilliantly planned or executed” – Just Stop Oil activists throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery in 2022, for instance – “but that’s OK. These sorts of movements are messy. But I just find it insane, the level of repression, and how little mainstream liberals and conservatives, left and right, have stepped up to this.”

Time for ecofeminism

Walter came relatively late to climate activism. In The New Feminism (1998), she argued that women needed to stop policing each other’s behaviour and focus on securing political power and equality. Living Dolls (2010) tackled the sexualisation of culture and what it meant for women. Her latest book, Feminism for a World on Fire, imagines a feminism that acknowledges what the climate crisis means for women, especially but not exclusively in the Global South. Feminism, she argues, has let itself be subsumed by the consumer society and dreams of personal empowerment. It has stopped being political. She wrote Feminism for a World on Fire partly out of a sense of frustration that the environmental movement in the UK seemed to have no space for ecofeminism.

“When I was in Extinction Rebellion, I was really struggling to get women together to talk about feminist ideas in the environmental movement.” There was an emphasis on care, she says, and feminist principles guided the movement, but somehow it did not quite come together. Yet, for Walter, the movements are meaningless without each other. “Environmentalism without feminism is a patriarchy in the forest, but the women’s movement without environmentalism is a women’s centre on a dead planet.”

Bringing the two movements together is all the more important when mainstream feminism has become a marketable commodity to which the big tech companies pay lip service, and where women must climb over each other to reach the top. She says “this rhetoric of Lean In, ‘You go girl, give zero fucks, keep moving on, keep moving up’” reached an apogee in 2025, when Amazon’s chairman Jeff Bezos launched six women into sub-orbit to promote his Blue Origin space programme.

Feminism has let itself be subsumed by the consumer society and dreams of personal empowerment. It has stopped being political.

“The interests of capitalism feed off that kind of self-empowerment. It suits capitalism. You can sell women more goods, more stuff with the message that you can liberate yourself just through shopping, through constant makeovers and renewal… I was quite shocked when I started using Instagram by how many women that I thought of as feminists are engaged there in just selling stuff.”

Platforms have enabled some women to establish vast personal brands, but have also fed a form of apolitical narcissism. In the past decade, Walter says, the women’s movement has atomised, with “less and less empathy and solidarity between women from different parts of the world and different backgrounds.”

As director of the charity Women for Refugee Women, she found herself increasingly frustrated by performative, celebrity-driven events that felt very distant from the lives of ordinary women. At the same time, charities working with vulnerable women became more professional. There is more transparency and clearer guidance about how to act, but something has been lost. In the 1980s, one activist told her, women who reported domestic abuse would be supported, driven to a refuge, and hugged. “Now I see my colleagues taking that same call. They are polite. They go through the safeguarding checklist. They give her another number to call…” Grassroots work is vital because it is “where women find the tools for survival”.

In the UK, the Rochdale child sexual abuse scandal, where girls were raped by groups of men of mainly Pakistani origin between the 1990s and 2010s, has become a rallying point for the far-right Reform UK and Restore parties. They claim that the failure to prosecute the rapists for years shows that feminists did not protect girls for fear of being seen as racist. Walter, however, argues that the scandal persisted because the police did not listen to women working in frontline organisations.

She has spent time with women’s groups in the Middle East, and Feminism for a World on Fire reminds readers that however frightening global heating seems in Europe and the US, it has even worse consequences for the Global South. The impact specifically on women is under-researched, but the work we do have shows that women are more likely to die than men when food is scarce and during droughts and floods. Domestic violence rises during climate crises. A UN study found that it increases by 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature. Another study on heatwaves in Kenya found that pregnant women were vulnerable to cardiovascular problems in high temperatures and were still expected to collect water. Feminism for a World on Fire reminds readers that however frightening global heating seems in Europe and the US, it has even worse consequences for the Global South. The impact specifically on women is under-researched, but the work we do have shows that women are more likely to die than men when food is scarce and during droughts and floods. Domestic violence rises during climate crises. A UN study found that it increases by 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature. Another study on heatwaves in Kenya found that pregnant women were vulnerable to cardiovascular problems in high temperatures and were still expected to collect water.

Domestic violence rises during climate crises, 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature.

“When societies are stressed, men are often taking out that stress and that precarity on women … It’s here, it’s now. You know, women’s crops are already failing because of the droughts and then the cyclones in Malawi. The girls living in the areas affected by floods in Bangladesh, they’re already missing out on school, they’re already being married off early. Their future is gone.”

Involvement at all levels

How to conclude a book that sets out the scale of the crisis and the misery to come? Walter admits it was difficult. She feels the least satisfactory sections of her previous two books about feminism were her efforts to direct people to organisations that were doing good work. Instead, “We need to have more faith in the idea that we can get involved in our community,” and organise to achieve a particular goal.

How to conclude a book that sets out the scale of the crisis and the misery to come? Walter admits it was difficult. She feels the least satisfactory sections of her previous two books about feminism were her efforts to direct people to organisations that were doing good work. Instead, “We need to have more faith in the idea that we can get involved in our community,” and organise to achieve a particular goal.

She is drawn to local activism, partly as an antidote to the sense of powerlessness that has seized the environmental movement, but also as an alternative to the endless scroll of digital “engagement”, a “relentless roll call of pain” – and because, as 1980s activists knew, only by meeting people face-to-face do we come to understand the messy complexity of their lives.

Walter acknowledges that the kinds of frustrations and compromises involved in unglamorous, local activism are by no means easy. “I’m not romanticising it, but I think it’s the only way to rebuild in the face of what we’re facing now.” Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book End Times Fascism offers a similar vision for local activism in the face of Big Tech dominance and the rise of the far right.

I ask Walter why so few women, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez excepted, are leading the charge against Trumpian politics and environmental destruction. Zohran Mamdani is the great hope of socialists in the US, and the figureheads of the British left are men: Zack Polanski leads the Greens in England and Wales, while Labour has never had a female leader in its entire history. The European far right, by contrast, has cultivated several charismatic women leaders, including Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel, and Marine Le Pen.

“I think women who try and emerge on the left as leaders just feel too disruptive,” Walter says. “They break the mould of what our societies want to see in women too much, and they’re not valued. They face such a barrage of misogyny from their enemies. It just makes them unviable as leaders, as we saw with Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. I’m not saying they were particularly charismatic or progressive leaders. Very problematic, I think, in many ways.” Both the former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and Finland’s Sanna Marin left frontline politics before middle age also because of intense backlash.

But the fact that female leadership is lacking should not deter women from getting involved. “We need more women climate leaders. But I also think we need more good followership. I think we need, as women, to get involved in stuff.”

“And you can make a change by contributing whatever you contribute. I really like telling stories and drawing out threads. But I also like doing the other stuff, just standing at the stalls at the eco-fair or going along and helping in the community garden or with the drop-in at the women’s centre.”

Stepping up

An earlier generation of radical feminists might observe that this is what middle-class British women like Walter have done for centuries – volunteered in their communities, unpaid and largely unnoticed, meeting the needs that the state will not. Is this a flight from catastrophe into the private sphere, a 21st-century version of Voltaire’s il faut cultiver notre jardin? But Walter’s feminism is anchored in the city, in the marches and demonstrations she still regularly attends. “I’m not much of a hippy. I’m living quite a normal urban life. People see ecofeminism in a maybe more radical and hippy box than that, and I’d like to say no, this is for everyone.”

Walter’s feminism is alive to the cruelties that emerge when people compete for scarce resources. As a charity leader, she saw “such divisions between women, hardening borders, that dehumanisation that creeps into people’s rhetoric”. In the UK, where groups of black-clad, balaclava-wearing men have been gathering to block roads and demand Britain “stop the boats”, the sense of fracture is acute. The Left observes bitterly that when climate protesters – some of them elderly women – lay down in the street, they were put in jail: the men of the far right, on the other hand, have been allowed to disperse without being arrested.

Towards the end of the book, Walter recounts seeing on her phone images of “the body of a female fighter being thrown from a building” in north-east Syria, where she had visited a group of women planning a better future. She tries to apply the lessons she learnt there about female solidarity in London, too. “When I feel really lost about the way forward it’s often the women around me who keep me going,” she writes. None of them “only spend their time asking other people to do things… They use their own talents and courage, and put them to work.”

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.