The European People’s Party (EPP) has forcefully rejected an allegation from a far-right Polish MEP that it allowed the nationalist Patriots for Europe (PfE) group to seize control of a crucial climate bill because it wanted to see it buried.
The European Commission has proposed that the EU should cut greenhouse gas emissions to a tenth of the level in 1990 by the end of the next decade, which would mean a serious doubling down on climate action.
There was uproar in July when PfE lawmaker Ondřej Knotek was appointed parliamentary rapporteur, giving him considerable sway over the pace of the bill’s passage through Parliament. Green groups and progressive lawmakers said the centre-right EPP, as the largest group in the European Parliament, could have used its political heft to prevent the appointment.
Now in a further twist, it has emerged that the PfE lawmaker Anna Bryłka is claiming her group was allowed to take the lead on the bill because it was “supposed to block it”.
In a video posted on YouTube on 5 September by a Polish news website, Bryłka alleged that the EPP deliberately let them take over the file so they would not be seen to impede its progress themselves. She described the arrangement as “camouflaged help”.
EPP reacts
Peter Liese, the EPP’s environment policy lead, angrily rejected Bryłka’s version of events. It was “in no way in our interest for the so-called Patriots to take the lead on the Climate Law revision”, Liese told Euractiv when asked for comment.
Liese said he did not know “if she is badly informed herself, or if she’s just lying shamelessly”, but in either event, what the Polish lawmaker said was untrue. “In the process for which I, as coordinator, am responsible from start to finish, there was never any cooperation of the kind claimed by Ms Bryłka,” Liese said.
“Unlike Ms Bryłka, who is not a member of the Environment Committee and has no knowledge of the procedure whatsoever, I was involved from the very beginning,” Liese added.
Liese reiterated the argument that other parties also had a chance to outbid the Patriots in the procedure to assign the legislative file after his party dropped out, and did not do so.
Despite the German Christian Democrat’s forthright remarks, it is a fact that the EPP sided with PfE in rejecting a request to fast-track the file through Parliament, an attempt by progressive groups to limit the far-right rapporteur’s scope to slow the bill’s progress.
No official position
Liese also said that some members of his group had “requested a rejection” of the 90% emissions cut target, but stressed that this position is neither his own nor that of his group, which has yet to agree its stance on the issue.
“Our aim is to reach an agreement on a target for 2040 and, in particular, to create the conditions to ensure that this target can actually be achieved,” Liese said, speaking on behalf of himself and fellow EPP member Lídia Pereira, who is the group’s lead negotiator on the file.
In a separate email, the two lawmakers also clarified some details of the EPP’s amendment proposal to bring forward the date enabling the use of international carbon credits to meet the 2040 climate goal, as reported by Euractiv yesterday.
“We hope that this would enable a broader majority in Council and help to find a stable majority in the Parliament as well,” Liese and Pereira said. The credits would allow EU states to pay for climate action overseas and count the associated CO2 reduction as their own.
The centre-right lawmakers further clarified that that their reference to an “annual” contribution of these credits towards meeting the 90% goal would not be cumulative: “the interpretation that it will lead to only 60% domestic effort in 2040 is completely misleading”.
The EPP was “willing to compromise with the other groups” — but said their “ability to compromise with S&D, Renew and maybe the Greens will very much depend on the flexibility of these groups”.
*Alexandra Brzozowski contributed reporting
(rh, aw)
