Europe's political leaders are largely staying silent on the climate crisis despite a summer of lethal temperatures and wildfires that have exposed a widening gulf between voters demanding action and politicians unwilling to confront the long-term choices global heating requires.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, France's veteran radical-left firebrand, told the summer congress of his France Insoumise party that the climate crisis means "we're going to have to change everything – the way we live, the way we produce, the way we trade." Mélenchon, who one poll this week suggested is the most likely rival to Marine Le Pen in next year's presidential run-off, said the term "climate change" may sound "almost reassuring," but its actual impact will feel like "landing on another planet whenever we leave home."
Record Heat and Political Silence
The speech is notable because despite the four heatwaves that have scorched Europe this summer, shattering temperature records, fanning unprecedented fires and causing thousands of excess deaths, few politicians want to talk about climate action. Europe is the world's fastest-warming continent, heating up twice as quickly as elsewhere. The consequences, as UN climate chief Simon Stiell puts it, are "reaching national emergency levels."
Yet major policy speeches by Europe's political leaders addressing the climate crisis, making plain its causes, and laying out the changes needed to live with it can be counted on the fingers of one hand. French voters have faced "silence from some politicians and inadequate pronouncements or demagoguery from others," said Le Monde in a stark editorial, warning that "decision-makers on both the right and the left are losing credibility."
People want "a political message that translates into action, and sheds light on the future," it said. The gap between "citizens' heightened awareness of the crisis and the lack of commitment from their elected officials to address it" will trigger mounting frustration and anger.
Voter Concern Rises
A mid-July Ipsos poll found environmental protection had jumped 12 points from June to become French voters' fourth greatest concern, after what the pollster described as "a first real experience of what the hell of a significantly hotter world might look like." In the UK too, Labour party activists worry that despite the ever more visible impacts of the climate crisis, there has been no major political push from the government on the issue, even as voters become increasingly convinced of the need for action.
While Friedrich Merz said this week action was needed to "curb climate change and adapt to the consequences" (though not at a cost to German industry), he's been accused all summer of ducking the issue for fear of boosting the climate-sceptic, far-right AfD. There are exceptions. Spain's outspoken prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has long warned that "climate change kills," and recently stressed: "It's not enough to address the consequences; what we have to do is reduce its causes."
A French centre-left presidential contender, Raphäel Glucksmann, spoke this week of the need for an "ecological transformation" ending the use of fossil fuels, and pledged a 100-day "ecological revolution" if elected president, which looks extremely unlikely.
Short-Termism and Adaptation Battles
But the silence from most mainstream politicians is deafening, says Jean Jouzel, a veteran French climatologist. The political class in general, he says, "have simply not yet engaged with the reality of global heating. They have to tackle it head-on." The root of the problem, Jouzel suggests, is that "politicians live in the short-term. Their horizon is avoiding any damage during their period in office. For me, a real political leader … has the courage to look to the medium and the long-term."
Short-termism, political polarisation and cost-of-living fears have silenced leaders across Europe, as populist and far-right parties successfully frame green laws as an "ideological mantra" and the elite's punishment for "ordinary working people." Voters suffering high energy bills, food inflation and stagnating wages are unlikely to hail demands for real financial and lifestyle sacrifices in pursuit of an ill-defined climate gain. Carbon taxes and boiler restrictions carry electoral risk.
That reluctance to address the real issue has shifted Europe's climate debate away from long-term carbon reduction towards more localised adaptation, which has itself become a battleground in the continent's culture wars. Air conditioning is a prime example, now loudly touted on Europe's right as a vital symbol of personal freedom and technological comfort, but widely decried by the left as environmentally irresponsible and symptomatic of long-term planning failures.
"If I am elected president, I will put into place a massive air-conditioning plan," Le Pen trumpeted this summer, arguing the technology had little or no impact on global heating: "When environmentalists don't want something, they twist the studies."
Long-Term Goals Pushed Aside
The risk is that by focusing on necessary but essentially reactive coping measures, leaders wind up reducing the existential challenges of global heating to debates over consumer choice and comfort that can fit into an electoral cycle. Vital long-term carbon reduction gets pushed further into the background. As Dutch MEP Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy argues, "Nobody should feel guilty for wanting relief from extreme heat. Air conditioning saves lives." However, he continues, neither should we "accept the cynical argument that the answer to rising temperatures is simply to install more air conditioning – while abandoning the very policies designed to tackle the causes of those rising temperatures."
In the multiple European countries with national elections coming up over the next 18 months – including France, Italy and Spain – the climate emergency remains, for the time being at least, largely absent from the debate. As Jouzel says, "Global heating is no longer a scientific debate. It's a very real political problem." Grégoire Leménager, writing in the French weekly Le Nouvel Obs, agreed. "Looking the other way is no longer an option," he said. Nothing is simple, but after the summer Europe has just endured, politicians who "refuse to make climate action a cornerstone of their manifestos" will, he continued, "be exposed for what they are: criminal accomplices to an inevitable defeat."
