From Brussels Blame to Domestic Blame: National Parliamentary Discourses on the European Green Deal in Central Europe

As one of the most important EU projects ever adopted, the European Green Deal (EGD) has met with enormous scholarly attention (not only) in political science. Yet considerable knowledge-gap still exists on how national parliaments interpret, debate, and contest EGD content and implementation. This is surprising as these institutions remain primary actors of representative democracy. The proposed paper examines parliamentary discourses on the EGD in Central European parliaments, drawing on a corpus of over 2,000 Green Deal-related speeches delivered in Czech Sněmovna, Austrian Nationalrat, Slovakian Národná rada and Polish Sejm since 2021. Through discourse-framing analysis, the study investigates how political parties across ideological spectra frame the EGD and its national policy implications. Building on the analytical framework developed by Pollex (2025) for mapping party positions on climate justice and climate scepticism in the European Parliament, this study extends the analysis to domestic legislative arenas and adds other layers and variables relevant to national level of climate and energy policies. The comparative design follows a most-similar cases logic: the four countries share comparable geographic, economic, and recent developments (e.g. impact on Russian aggression to Ukraine) contexts, yet differ in the composition of governing coalitions and opposition forces, involving several unique ideological combinations. Preliminary findings suggest that the EGD is undergoing a discursive transformation—from a “Brussels blame game” used to externalize responsibility toward the EU, to a “domestic blame game” in which national actors accuse each other of having negotiated or endorsed a deeply controversial project. The paper contributes to broader debates on EU climate governance, democratic resilience, and legitimacy, by revealing how domestic political contestation shapes the reception and implementation of the EGD within member states’ representative institutions.