Green Ambitions and Political Shifts: The EU Commission’s Role in Turbulent Times

After an ambitious and ground-breaking launch of the European Green Deal in 2019—the ‘man on the moon’ moment of the European integration it promised progress towards climate neutrality and green and just transition— the momentum appears to have waned, with the political agenda shifting back to the focus on economic growth and competitiveness that dominated the decade before Von der Leyen I Commission took office. While there is broad consensus in the literature that the European Commission has played a pivotal, albeit not always consistent, role in determining EU environmental and climate policies, several gaps remain in our understanding of policymaking dynamics that have influenced the Commission’s policy choices over the last decades in response to multiple crises the EU has faced. Drawing on Ansell and co-authors’ conception of turbulence as a “condition” (Ansell & Trondal, 2018. 43), we argue that the European Commission fluctuating green agenda has been a result of the Commission’s legitimation strategy aimed to respond to the “increasingly volatile context for complex climate problem-solving” (Ansell et al., 2020, p. 3). Within this context, the Commission’s agenda-setting role has become increasingly political (Nugent and Rhinard, 2019), involving dynamics that go beyond the interinstitutional related to the introduction of the Spitzenkandidaten procedure and namely i) offering to a political vision that favours further integration process; ii) appealing directly to the European public; iii) strengthening the Commission’s inter-institutional leadership in driving the political agendas (Nugent and Rhinard, 2019: 210). Accordingly, we argue that as a consequence of increasing politicisation, the Commission has “governed with turbulence”, following the logic of ‘dynamic resilience’ by adjusting its political agenda and governance arrangements to accommodate the multiple policy “repertoires” suggested by public opinion and political preferences across EU countries (external legitimacy), going beyond the positions expressed by the main political groups in the European Parliament (internal legitimacy). The analysis combines text analysis techniques and a qualitative research method, drawing on a wide range of sources, including EU Commission documents and official speeches, Eurobarometer surveys and reports, and national party manifestos. By focusing on three research hypotheses connected to both internal and external legitimation, our preliminary findings show that the Commission’s agenda does not appear to be aligned neither with the EP majority, regardless the Spitzenkandidaten procedure nor with the European parties’ electoral manifestos, while it reflects public opinion trends, following the most salient issues, again irrespective of the Spitzenkandidaten procedure.