Changing EU Institutional Discourses on the Green Deal: from the First to the Second Von Der Leyen Commission

Following the European Parliament elections of June 2024, with the electoral success of right-wing and far-right parties, political support for ambitious climate action and the European Green Deal (EGD) has declined. While the EGD was one of the top priorities of the first von der Leyen Commission (2019-2024), after her re-appointment for a second mandate von der Leyen refocused the Commission’s agenda around economic competitiveness and the simplification of allegedly too burdensome green regulation. This is visible in initiatives such as the Clean Industrial Deal and the legislative amendments of the Omnibus package. In addition to changing domestic political dynamics, economic stagnation/crisis and geopolitical tensions appear to have played a role in the weakening political momentum behind the EGD. Economic challenges resulted in more intense corporate lobbying for deregulation and delaying the green agenda. Geopolitical rivalry created competing (funding) priorities, for instance in defence, and pushed for a reformulation of the green agenda along more strategic and mercantilist lines, as shown by the Critical Raw Materials and Net-Zero Industry Acts. This paper examines the discursive shift in the European Commission with a focus on von der Leyen’s second mandate, which began in December 2024, until the end of 2025. Applying Critical Frame Analysis, it examines the public discourses of the Commission President, the Commissioners dealing with the green transition (both as main topic or as a subtopic of their portfolios) and the main relevant policy documents and legislative acts published by the Commission in this period. The analysis relates these discourses to the themes of domestic politics, economic crisis and geopolitical tensions outlined above. The goal is to illustrate the Commission’s shifting discursive focus away from the EGD and investigate which frames and factors were more prominent in the process.