The future of the EU is being jeopardised by people stirring up social tensions for short-term political gain, Spain’s environment minister has said ahead of next month’s European parliamentary elections.
Teresa Ribera, who is heading the list for the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ party in June’s poll, said the European project is at risk of “an implosion”.
She told the Guardian: “When you have people asking themselves what scapegoats they can use for their problems – rather than correctly identifying the causes of their problems and addressing them – the search for scapegoats ratchets up.
“And that breaks coexistence in a society. I think that’s the riskiest point we’re facing right now – the risk of an implosion of a European project that’s probably one of the most successful projects in history, and of course in recent European history.”
Ribera said that Europe, already struggling with “traditional, violent, enormously bloody and painful wars in both Ukraine and Gaza”, also faced threats from those who use energy, food, disinformation and social media manipulation as the tools of modern warfare.
At a time of such global upheaval and uncertainty, she added, centre-right politicians must resist the urge to ape the far right or to enter into alliances with it.
“I think it’s been shown that it’s a huge error – and historically always has been – to think that looking for common territory with the far right is a way to pacify the far right,” she said. “That never works. The French know that very well; I think the republican principle of a cordon sanitaire against things that aren’t tolerable is still the best answer.”
Ribera said she had been deeply troubled by the moderate right’s increasing embrace of the far right and its tactics and language. Although the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, recently criticised some on the far right for being “Putin’s proxies”, she refused to rule out working with the hardline European Conservatives and Reformists Group, which includes Spain’s far-right Vox party, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party and Poland’s Law and Justice party.
“I think that’s very worrying and, up to a certain point, it was a betrayal,” said Ribera.
“When [European People’s party leader Manfred] Weber questioned the restoration of ecosystems, or in the words Von der Leyen has used in these pre-electoral moments, I didn’t see the classic Christian democracy that was at the fore of the construction of the European project, along with social democracy and the liberals. I think that’s very worrying and that we should avoid those kinds of temptations.”
Ribera, who has led Spain’s environmental agenda for the past six years, pointed to the recent neo-fascist rallies in Italy as proof that Europe’s authoritarian past was intruding on its democratic present.
“That is what’s at stake right now,” she said. “That’s being normalised. Does anyone really think that recognising this kind of behaviour as legitimate is going to make it disappear? Quite the opposite. It will just grow and become seen as just another sign of institutional and public life.”
Ribera described von der Leyen’s words as “enormously unfortunate” but insisted they showed the importance of people turning out to vote in June.
“Participation in European elections is usually lower than in local or national elections because people think that all this stuff just goes on working alongside our daily reality,” she said. “But that’s a lie: whoever’s in Brussels will end up defending policies in all our member states but also our capacity to react to any crisis.”
Ribera said Spain was all too familiar with pacts between the centre right and the far right since the conservative People’s party and Vox began teaming up to form regional coalition governments. She noted that three UN experts had recently warned that new laws proposed by three such regional governments – which have been criticised as attempts to “whitewash” the Franco dictatorship – could contravene international human rights standards.
The minister also said the climate emergency was too pressing and too critical to be used as part of culture wars and partisan politics.
“From a physical point of view, it’s obviously impossible to ask nature or the climate system to give us more time,” she said. “The dynamics have been evolving and will continue evolving whether we pay attention to them or not. But it’s more than that – if we don’t pay attention then we’ll accelerate that deterioration.”
The choice, she added, was between reacting as soon as possible to mitigate the effects of the emergency, reduce costs and generate opportunities, or waiting “for those dynamics themselves to hit us in the form of floods, terrible heatwaves and the collapse of our industrial infrastructure”.
Ribera stressed the importance of engaging the public in the fight against apathy, despair, and active disinformation.
“The far right – and the right has seconded them on this – has sought to portray this agenda as a kind of cultural agenda to be fought against,” she said. “It’s distorted reality as if by questioning the messenger and the message it’ll avoid the problems we’re having.”
She said she would do everything in her power to save the beleaguered European Green Deal, which aims to restore biodiversity, clean up the environment, and mitigate climate breakdown. The EU has already diluted a series of proposed laws including the nature restoration law, which is on the verge of collapse, and scrapped other plans including new rules on pesticides.
“I will do everything in my power to stop the Green Deal failing and to make sure that it’s viable, agile and just,” said Ribera.
“I think that’s the most important political message of this campaign. I think the failure of the Green Deal wouldn’t just be a failure for Europe; it would be a failure for Europe’s citizens and for their opportunities.”