“If we go bankrupt, no one will care about the natural environment in the world anymore,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said last week in Strasbourg.
The European People’s Party (EPP) will not join forces with French far-right leader Jordan Bardella to temporarily suspend the EU’s landmark Green Deal, the centre-right chair of the European Parliament’s environment committee said on Tuesday.
“To Bardella, I would just say no. We have a completely different vision (on the Green Deal),” MEP Peter Liese (Germany/EPP) said at a press conference on Tuesday, emphasizing that climate targets are central to the bloc’s strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Bardella, the head of the European Parliament’s far-right Patriots for Europe group and president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, sent a letter dated 28 January to the EPP, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), and the European Sovereign Nations (ESN) groups in Parliament. In it, he urged them to form an alternative alliance against the left to scale back measures aimed at making the EU climate-neutral by 2050.
“It is imperative that Parliament take swift, massive and concrete action to protect our companies, our citizens and our future,” Bardella wrote to the right-wing groups. He argued that temporarily suspending the Green Deal would allow for a re-evaluation of its objectives and implementation “without destroying the prospects of prosperity for our continent.”