For decades, cities throughout the world have based their mobility programmes on a misguided assumption: that car ownership will only keep growing. But as more cities challenge the auto-centric model and embrace “multimodality”, a new paradigm is emerging. Bringing about this alternative vision requires not only bold, innovative solutions, but also robust new planning institutions.

For many of us, having to juggle work, school, and other daily obligations, getting stuck in traffic is a daily nuisance. In order to carry out our responsibilities, we participate in the traffic system, which costs us a lot of time and money and harms our physical and mental health.

Some of these consequences, such as safety and stress, are easy to recognise. But research tells us that daily urban mobility also has a great impact on rates of obesity, diabetes, heart complaints, respiratory illnesses, dementia, and depression, amongst other health problems. These health conditions are also linked to common harmful transport emissions, such as particles resulting from the friction of tyres on asphalt, exhaust fumes, and general noise pollution created by vehicles. What’s more, traffic also causes greenhouse gas emissions, which are directly linked to the climate crisis and other related social and ecological problems.

In order to improve urban mobility and address its problems, modern cities put special care into the planning of their urban mobility systems. To this end, one of the main goals they aspire to is becoming a “multimodal” city – a place where inhabitants can choose and combine high-quality methods of mobility, and where owning and using a car is the last option, not a compulsion. This means prioritising more active forms of movement, such as walking and riding a bicycle, especially for journeys of only a few kilometres. For longer journeys around the city, the mobility system must offer a variety of complementary combinations using high-quality public transport, such as buses and trams for short journeys, and underground trains and regional train lines for longer trips and transporting large numbers of people.

In practice, however, many cities still struggle to establish effective new planning institutions to achieve this desired result due to a variety of reasons.

Firstly, following the influence of the North American urban planning paradigm, many cities in the previous century gave priority to private cars – by dedicating street space as well as setting aside large areas for car parks – instead of, say, green spaces. This outdated planning approach assumed that the level of motorisation (i.e. the number of private cars per inhabitant) would increase and that, as a city’s population grew, more and more infrastructure would need to be dedicated to this very inefficient form of urban mobility.

Now, cities find themselves at a turning point between old and new paradigms of urban mobility planning. As the problems with the old system become clearer, a new paradigm is still developing and trying to find its way into practice. So far, it appears in cities that have been brave enough to leave behind old ways of thinking and create new, modern planning institutions. These cities, including Paris, Vienna, Helsinki, and Ljubljana, are leading by example. Although the emerging paradigm is not yet clearly defined, five main elements can often be found in their planning institutions.

This outdated planning approach assumed that the level of motorisation (i.e. the number of private cars per inhabitant) would increase and that, as a city’s population grew, more and more infrastructure would need to be dedicated to this very inefficient form of urban mobility.

The pillars of good planning

The first and most fundamental consideration in planning for multimodal cities is to have a far-reaching outlook. When it comes to urban mobility, even short-term interventions should follow long-term priorities. Taking a long-term view means considering possible future scenarios at least 20 years from now, and ideally even 30 to 50 years. Moreover, innovative thinking should be an inseparable part of this exercise to ensure that expectations of the future are not just a continuation of past trends. In concrete terms, this means we shouldn’t just assume that the rate of motorisation will grow, and that the number of cars on the road will increase as the population increases. Instead, cities must imagine alternative scenarios in which most journeys are made on foot, by bicycle, and by public transport. In other words, such a vision of the future must have citizens’ wellbeing at its heart.

This must apply to different types of people with different needs, constraints, and daily experiences of the transport system. 

In addition, a strategic planning perspective requires understanding the difference between costs and investment. Changing public transport infrastructure (and especially rail) requires millions of euros in investment, but the investment is well worth it when it is considered over 50 or even 100 years’ time – its usual length of service.

A key insight in modern planning courses entails that land use is the first and most important public policy for urban mobility. This brings us to the second pillar of multimodal city planning: the integration of spatial planning into urban mobility as part of a wider package of public policies.

As soon as you have a beginning and end point for any planned movement, you are defining a mobility system. Therefore, to realise the desired vision of the city, the spatial plan and the urban mobility system must be closely connected. This means viewing public space as a whole and considering factors like population density, planned activities, land-use diversity, and the design of all elements that make up the streetscape.

Beyond these infrastructural considerations, an integrated plan must also address economic factors, such as how public transport services, as well as educational and medical infrastructure, will be paid for. In practice, this means public policy needs to consider a package of complementary measures: those that encourage walking, cycling, and public transport, as well as measures to discourage unnecessary car use. Here, complementarity also means measures which relate to other areas of public policy, such as education, health and employment systems.

The third element crucial in successful urban planning is having quality data about mobility systems for different groups of people. The basic idea taught in traffic management courses for decades is that cities must follow a digital-numerical model of urban transport systems. This enables the modelling of a series of steps – from how the need to move around develops to how movement equates to traffic flow on this or that street or line of public transport. A computer model like this is ideal for examining the complex consequences of different intervention packages, because it not only allows us to understand the problems that exist today, but also enables us to explore different future scenarios relatively cheaply. Urban mobility models should be built based on relevant data about people’s daily travel habits as well as their characteristics and desires. This kind of analysis is usually done through questionnaires that ask residents about their current and desired travel patterns.

That said, models and surveys are not enough on their own. A modern planning institution needs to collect large amounts of automatic data, as well as data that enables deeper analysis. One example would be information collected anonymously and automatically by smartphone, through analysis of telecommunication network signals or various applications using GPS or other telephone sensors. Another useful strategy would be collecting data about reasons for travel, such as attitudes and beliefs, as well as information about the characteristics of movement for particular groups of people – data obtainable only through carrying out surveys or interviews with the relevant population sample.

Perspective is key

You may have noticed that this text does not use the traditional term “traffic planning”, but instead talks about mobility planning. This is one of the important assumptions that a modern urban planning institute should have. The aim of planning is not to enable traffic flow or prevent traffic congestion. Those are important elements to consider, but the primary concern is creating a system that enables people to move around the city and gives them access to all the various activities a city can provide within a certain timeframe. This must apply to different types of people with different needs, constraints, and daily experiences of the transport system. Therefore – and this is the fourth pillar of good planning – evaluating different scenarios must include systemic perspectives as well as those of citizens themselves.

The city’s inhabitants themselves should be included in the planning process – not only at the end, when the alternatives are being evaluated, but already in the early stages, when alternative scenarios of the future are being created.

On the one hand, it is necessary to show with a model what the cumulative effects of any mobility infrastructure will be, for example in greenhouse gas emissions caused by the transport system, or the overall level of noise on one street. On the other hand, it is necessary to assess whether an alternative system can offer a functional and high-quality daily experience of mobility infrastructure. The model mentioned in the third pillar is a way to achieve this, but we can also use other methods. One of these solutions, which can be called the “person method,” evaluates mobility systems from the perspective of specific groups, such as children, older people without access to a car, or young parents with limited financial means.

It must be noted that high-quality planning focuses not solely on the content, but also on the infrastructure development process itself. The essence of a modern planning institution is a carefully considered process that develops through a series of clearly defined activities over time, with shared and clearly defined responsibilities for all participants. It is vital to include a range of experts, in addition to those who traditionally take part in urban mobility planning projects. For example, a high-quality process should include experts in regional economics, sociology, psychology, and the environment. What’s more, the city’s inhabitants themselves should be included in the planning process – not only at the end, when the alternatives are being evaluated, but already in the early stages, when alternative scenarios of the future are being created.

A planning process that explicitly includes different perspectives – the last of the five pillars – makes it possible to develop solutions that take into account citizens’ needs and experiences, rendering the various public policy measures more acceptable to them. Citizen participation itself can be organised using traditional methods, such as workshops and public hearings, as well as through modern digital tools like online questionnaires which use interactive maps. These tools provide valuable data, comments, and suggestions from citizens which can be directly linked to concrete locations in the city. Such an inclusive approach demands robust cooperation and entails constructive conflict between different values and assumptions about life in the city.

Towards a 21st-century paradigm

Cities have always changed and will continue to do so, along with humanity itself. New forms of mobility will appear in the transport system, as we have recently witnessed with the arrival of electric scooters on streets across the world. People’s habits will also change and diversify, leading to ever-increasing demands on urban mobility systems. Thanks to the rise of remote working, we are also seeing a change in people’s mobility habits.

Even though the majority of these and other aspects will remain extremely difficult to predict, one thing is certain: planning institutions need to change. They need to rise to the challenges of the 21st century in order to respect the needs of citizens as well as the environment. New institutions will also have to think carefully about how to invest in effective, applicable interventions that fulfil the desired objectives of new mobility paradigms. Only through the development of visionary and brave planning institutions can a city of wellbeing emerge.  

This article first appeared in Serbian in Omorika. It is republished here with permission. Translated by Alex Melbourne | Voxeurop 

In rhetoric, the far right pitches itself as a defender of ordinary citizens, but its policies often serve the powerful. In Czechia, building and agricultural land reforms put forward by Andrej Babiš’s government exemplify this dynamic. Civil society and grassroots organisations are fighting back. But can they turn their opposition into organised political power?

Democratic backsliding is most typically associated with attacks on courts, media freedom, elections, or civil society. In Czechia, some of the most consequential shifts are currently arriving in a less visible way – disguised as solutions. Since returning to power in 2025, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s ANO movement, backed by the far-right SPD and Motorists parties, has been promoting a series of reforms supposedly designed to tackle pressing problems such as housing unaffordability, land speculation, and precarious food security. However, what these reforms deliver is less public oversight, less social welfare, less resilience, but more power in the hands of corporations and oligarchy.

The first proposed reform aims to introduce a preferential purchase right for farmers leasing agricultural land, ostensibly to protect food sovereignty and curb speculation. The second, nicknamed “Lex Developer” by its civil society critics, is framed as a solution to the housing crisis through faster planning and permitting procedures.

The likely beneficiaries of these reforms, however, are not struggling family farmers or households priced out of the housing market. In a country where the state has long been captured by corporate interests (and the prime minister himself is one of the country’s most influential agribusiness owners through the conglomerate Agrofert), these seemingly pragmatic responses to urgent public problems risk major societal and environmental consequences.

A Czech shock doctrine

Human societies are facing multiple, mutually reinforcing crises that scientists increasingly understand as interconnected expressions of deeper structural contradictions in capitalist socio-ecological relations. Under the dominance of the market, housing, agricultural land, and food are treated as financial assets instead of basic rights and strategic resources. The environmental and social costs of this model accumulate over time, occasionally erupting in visible moments of disruption.

Some critics argue that the term “crisis” has lost its meaning. Crisis implies a temporary condition demanding urgent political action, yet many contemporary problems are chronic and structural. They require long-term, systemic transformation rather than emergency responses. Instead, political and economic elites often choose to exploit the language of crisis, using urgency to obscure root causes, advance their own interests, and consolidate the status quo.

As Naomi Klein famously argued in The Shock Doctrine (2007), moments of heightened urgency create opportunities for accelerated decision-making, controversial policies, and exceptional interventions. Drastic measures are often shielded from democratic scrutiny by being presented as technical and pragmatic solutions. It is often through appeals to efficiency that bypassing public debate becomes justified. Critics, meanwhile, are dismissed as simultaneously unrealistic and obstructive, to the point of being held responsible for worsening the crisis.

In Czechia, these dynamics can be illustrated through housing and its entanglement with post-socialist legacies. The Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and its founder, former prime minister and president Václav Klaus, have promoted the idea that democracy is inseparable from the free market and under threat from an unelected civil society operating outside of formal politics. Public debate in Czechia has thus largely accepted that anything from rising prices to housing shortages should be attributed to state bureaucracy and activists: the former for its slow permitting procedures, the latter for delaying development and preventing the market from meeting demand.

A different pattern is followed in the case of food security. In Czechia, agricultural production is concentrated among domestic oligarchs, whose interests are closely linked to the state. High food prices and supply disruptions are therefore often blamed on external factors, such as international retail chains, European environmental policies, and geopolitical instability. What remains similar is the perception of the state and civic actors as a threat.

Both cases reveal a governing strategy which relies on real or perceived crises to shift attention away from questions of power, ownership, and alternative futures, redirecting it towards scapegoats and supposedly straightforward fixes. In this way, solutions to serious contemporary problems are devised by those who contributed to the problems in the first place, whereas weakened democratic oversight helps secure the growing influence of hegemonic actors.

Food sovereignty as concentration

Czechia, due to its socialist legacies and neoliberal transformation, has a peculiar agricultural structure. With the collapse of state socialism, agricultural land was returned to millions of individual owners whose ancestors had lost their land due to collectivisation. After 1989, large production units and farming cooperatives created through this process were transformed into big agricultural enterprises and agroholdings. This led to land ownership becoming highly fragmented, despite farming itself being among the most concentrated and industrialised in Europe. According to a 2024 report by the Czech Ministry of Agriculture, 71.8 per cent of Czech agricultural land is leased rather than farmed by its owners, and most of that land is cultivated by large agricultural enterprises.

In this context, Andrej Babiš’s government has proposed introducing a pre-emption right for farmers leasing agricultural land. If adopted, owners wishing to sell their land would first have to offer it to the current tenants. The reform is presented by the government as a response to two widely recognised concerns: the growing financialisation of farmland and the need to strengthen Czech food sovereignty and food security in an increasingly unstable world.

At first glance, such a proposal sounds reasonable. Few people would object to protecting agricultural land from speculative investment. But the popular image of a family farmer working a modest piece of land, which agrifood enterprises and retail chains like to use in their marketing, hardly corresponds to the realities of Czech agriculture, dominated by large enterprises farming hundreds or thousands of hectares. By contrast, family and smaller private farms operate on only about 10-20 per cent of agricultural land. Therefore, the pre-emption right would grant dominant agricultural actors an opportunity to gradually purchase the land they already cultivate, and to further increase their control over agricultural resources.

71.8 per cent of Czech agricultural land is leased rather than farmed by its owners, and most of that land is cultivated by large agricultural enterprises

The gap between crisis rhetoric and the outcomes of proposed solutions is particularly visible through the government’s attempt to frame the reform as a defence of food sovereignty, a concept developed by farmers’ movements and food justice activists in defence of their communities’ access to land and ability to shape their own food systems against the control of large agricultural businesses. Research consistently shows that highly concentrated agricultural systems tend to favour a narrow range of export-oriented commodities and large-scale industrial production. In Czechia, this often means vast fields of cereal and industrial crop production (accounting for over 62 per cent of total crop production), while production of fruit, vegetables, and other labour-intensive foods is declining due to cost efficiency (for example, fruit production fell from 557,447 tons in 2000 to 123,530 tons in 2024).

Concentration of land ownership will thus inevitably undermine rather than strengthen food sovereignty, as well as more sustainable and just food systems. Our research on state food politics conducted at BOKU University in Vienna has also shown that Czech agricultural policy is primarily shaped by large agricultural enterprises and their profit-driven interests, while alternative food movements or small-scale farmers with more diverse and sustainable production have only a marginal influence.

Instead of tackling the structural problems of Czech agriculture, such as stagnating rural development, barriers faced by people who want to start their own farm, or the lack of support for more diverse forms of food production, the proposed preferential purchase right for farmers leasing agricultural land risks reinforcing the already dominant model based on the concentration of land, subsidies, and political influence by the domestic agricultural oligarchy and powerful agrifood enterprises.

Speculation as progress

If the agricultural land reform uses the language of food sovereignty to justify a further concentration of land ownership, the amendment to the Building Act recently approved by the Parliament performs a very similar trick in the urban space. In this case, the crisis language focuses on housing unaffordability. It is now an almost undisputed fact that Czechia, and Prague in particular, suffers from the worst housing crisis in the EU. Home ownership, so popular and normalised in a country where many were able to privatise their dwellings during the post-socialist transformation – creating what some scholars call a “super-homeownership” housing regime – is now increasingly out of reach.

As journalist Táňa Zabloudilová noted, young people facing housing insecurity are now increasingly being told by mainstream media that renting is the best option, and that tenancy is a widespread housing option in Western European countries. What they are being told less often is that those countries also have a strong tradition of social housing and tenants’ rights. Meanwhile, rents continue to rise in Czech cities, with average prices reaching approximately 19 euros per square metre in Prague this year. Moreover, affordable public housing is still a rarity, and the few affordable options on offer are often occupied by people with good connections and political influence, regardless of their income. For example, a recent investigation revealed that Minister for Regional Development Zuzana Mrázová of the ANO movement lived in affordable municipal housing while serving as mayor of Bílina.

Instead of building a robust social housing sector or taming housing financialisation through higher property taxes, the government recently passed an amendment to the building code, blaming expensive housing on slow construction due to long planning procedures, annoying regulations, pointless environmental reviews, and activists getting in the way – a mantra many Czechs have learned to repeat.

While accelerated construction will not deliver affordable housing and is a problem in itself, especially from the perspective of environmental and heritage protection, legal experts, planning specialists, environmental organisations, and municipal representatives also highlighted the amendment’s potential to reduce public oversight and participation, and to strengthen the position of developers and investors. The “Lex Developer” would benefit large corporate projects specifically, as permission procedures will not be sped up for small-scale projects.

As critics of the reform have pointed out, the housing crisis is a result of decades of commodification, speculative investment, the retreat of public housing, and successive governments’ unwillingness to seriously treat housing as a social right rather than a market commodity.¹ While politicians promise that building more will eventually make housing affordable, a growing share of newly built homes is acquired by investors, institutional landlords, and people who already own property. Moreover, developers can slow down or halt construction when the costs of labour and materials rise, undermining the argument that faster permitting procedures can address the housing crisis.

In Czechia, the housing crisis also causes a generational divide. Many older Czechs bought homes during the post-socialist transformation or before prices spiralled out of reach. Rising property values have since given them assets that younger generations can only dream of, and for some, investing in real estate has become a substitute for a pension system they no longer trust. Young people without family wealth, stable incomes, or access to credit often have no such option and remain trapped in an increasingly expensive rental market.

Yet these inequalities rarely decide elections. Homeowners still form a majority of the electorate, and in a country with some of Europe’s lowest property taxes, many directly benefit from rising property value. This helps explain why the mainstream debate largely avoids framing the housing crisis as a political question of wealth, inequality, and redistribution, and why the narrative of a technical problem of slow permitting has far greater appeal.

A certain paradox also transpires in the way power holders abuse Czech antipathies for communism and activists. In my earlier research on urban activism, I found that people in Czechia rarely mobilise because they oppose development itself. More often, they do so because decisions are made without them, in a top-down manner. In other words, participation, transparency, and public scrutiny emerge as responses to democratic deficits, not as their cause. Promoters of the “Lex Developer”, however, often frame civil society as a source of problems and public engagement against pragmatic market solutions as ultimately antidemocratic – a remnant of communist times.

The building code reform thus epitomises a peculiar Czech version of democratic deficit in which democracy is invoked to defend markets, while citizens attempting to exercise democratic influence and protect values such as heritage and a healthy environment are dismissed as enemies of progress.

Democratic erosion does not always arrive through spectacular attacks on democratic institutions. It also advances in more inconspicuous ways: through planning amendments, property law, and other reforms which the public may perceive as too technical to warrant their attention

Organising resistance

Both the agricultural land and the housing reforms assist the further concentration of power and capital in the hands of a few, aggravating structural problems at the heart of housing unaffordability and fragile food security. They also try to silence and delegitimise the opposition, represented by activists, civil society, and smallholders of farmland. According to Gabriela Svárovská, a Green member of the Czech parliament, the government’s project is “a peculiar form of corporate communism: costs, subsidies, and risks are distributed across society as a whole, while profits, assets, and decision-making power are concentrated in the hands of a small number of corporate groups.”

Under Babiš’s far-right government, democratic infrastructures in Czechia are facing a serious threat. But the backlash against both reforms also reveals these infrastructures’ resilience and determination in increasingly hostile conditions. The “Lex Developer” has long been challenged by the association of environmental organisations Zelený kruh (“Green circle”), heritage protection organisations, local activist groups, and some municipalities. The land reform has been challenged by the Association of Private Farming of the Czech Republic, which forms the most important opposition to the large agroindustrial lobby, advocating instead for a more decentralised and sustainable agricultural model based on family farms. Other critics include smaller agroecological initiatives promoting soil care, such as the Živá půda (“Living soil”) project, promoting more equitable access to farmland, and the Nadace pro půdu (“Foundation for the land”), focused on acquiring agricultural land for smallholder, organic, and beginning farmers.

In both cases, awareness-raising has been the main tactic, and civic associations are increasingly aware that cooperation and alliances across civil society and social movements are essential when facing a powerful opponent – a state captured by corporate and oligarchic interests. The concerns of private farmers in particular have often been amplified at mass protest events organised by Milion chvilek pro demokracii (“Million moments for democracy”), a grassroots movement able to mobilise hundreds of thousands of citizens through public campaigns, demonstrations, and community organising.

Still, many on the Czech Left view these anti-government protests and the civic organisations opposing the reforms as politically toothless, understanding democracy primarily in apolitical terms, as a matter of political culture, ethics, corruption, populism, and institutional integrity. Despite focusing on a variety of critical issues, the narratives put forward by Czech civic organisations tend to be only vaguely linked to questions of social inequality and economic power. In this polarised context, many professional civic organisations and pro-democratic mobilisations are regularly framed by both Left and Right as elitist, foreign-funded, disconnected from ordinary citizens’ everyday problems, and as supporters of liberal ideologies dictated by the EU.

Meanwhile, MPs of ODS, the main opposition force, representing the neoliberal orthodoxy, voted in favour of the “Lex Developer” in the name of economic growth and market efficiency. In doing so, they exposed a contradiction at the heart of Czech liberalism: attachment to property rights and individual freedom can easily evaporate when confronted with concentrated corporate power.

The situation is dire from a democratic perspective, but it also offers an opening for a real shift in Czech politics, which increasingly suffers from the absence of a strong Left. It is also an opportunity to build a truly grassroots counter-hegemony that translates dispersed experiences of insecurity, exclusion, and ecological crisis into a shared political project capable of challenging dominant economic and political arrangements. Some of this emancipatory work is being pioneered by Re-set: The Platform for Social-Ecological Transformation, particularly through its efforts to directly confront Czech fossil oligarchy and state capture by corporate interests, and by promoting decentralised economic power and organising solidarity struggles from below.

Current developments in Czechia offer a broader lesson for Europe and for green politics. Democratic erosion does not always arrive through spectacular attacks on democratic institutions. It also advances in more inconspicuous ways: through planning amendments, property law, and other reforms which the public may perceive as too technical to warrant their attention. The Czech government’s approach to housing and food sovereignty and security reveals a dangerous approach that does not just ignore the causes of crises but actively reproduces them, exploiting urgency to expand corporate power at the cost of democratic participation.

While we need to mobilise solutions to the multitude of crises we face today, we must also pay attention to how these crises are framed, who gets to define the solutions, and who is left out of the debate. In the face of a democratic deficit becoming institutionalised via concentrated corporate power, we must also ask how cleavages in a polarised society can be mended, particularly through finding common ground for solidarity, nurturing collective capacities for democratic participation, and rebuilding the social power needed to confront interconnected crises in just and inclusive ways.

1. For scientific publications about housing in Czechia see especially the research by the Socioeconomics of Housing department of the Czech Academy of Sciences: https://www.soc.cas.cz/cz/oddeleni/socioekonomie-bydleni
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From its outset, urban mobility has been built for and by men, mainly with one specific journey in mind: home to work and then back again. Not only does this design marginalise women and ignore their care-driven living patterns, but it also means their safety is endangered in the public space. Across the Balkans, grassroots organisations are mapping inequalities and reimagining urban mobility through a gender-responsive lens.

You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male.

– Mary Beard 

The urban environment has never been gender-neutral. In critical discussions of gender inequality, the binary division of space into public and private spheres often emerges as a key theme. Public affairs – and, therefore, the public sphere and mobility – have been dominated by men since antiquity, whereas the private sphere has been viewed predominantly as the domain of women and family life. This understanding of space, according to feminist urban theory, both illustrates and reproduces traditional gender power relations.

Urban mobility dictates when and how people move and carry out their daily routines, as well as who gets to do what. As a system of transport infrastructure that enables movement throughout the urban environment, urban mobility has been conceived, designed, and built by – and for – those who govern the public sphere. As such, urban mobility often ends up preventing the free and safe movement of women. The various elements which make up this infrastructure – such as public transport, street layout, pavements, and lighting – are built according to the needs of men, forcing women daily to try and fit into a space and way of doing things that does not recognise them.

The infrastructure of movement in urban areas is governed by three principles that, throughout history, have been important parameters for the performance of daily tasks traditionally undertaken by men: speed, efficiency, and precision. These principles took the pater familias from point A to point B – from home to work – and back again. Analysing the movements that women make every day, we discovered a much more layered connection between locations and activities – something known as “trip chaining”. This phenomenon represents the practice of connecting the shorter distances that women cover during the day into one “branched” journey which is not linear; rather, it involves visiting additional important locations within an overall pattern of movement.

These points on the journey, where women stop for a short period, are part of a structural issue – namely, caring for the family and the community – involving tasks that are imposed on them, such as taking and collecting children to and from school, going to the gym, grocery shopping, paying bills, taking care of elderly family members, and other care-related and “emotional” work.

Urban mobility dictates when and how people move and carry out their daily routines, as well as who gets to do what.

Globally, women perform 76.2 per cent of unpaid work caring for others and typically choose to work near home so that they can combine paid work with unpaid caregiving responsibilities. Treating household chores and caring responsibilities as “women’s issues” is another mechanism by which gender inequality is reproduced within urban life and women’s spatial movement. Reclaiming their space and freedom of movement often begins in the family.

The gender gap is even visible when we talk about riding a bicycle: globally, women use this mode of transport up to four times less than men. In Europe, specifically, the difference between men and women’s use of cycling as a means of transport is 64 per cent in Spain, 54 per cent in France and the UK, and 42 per cent in Germany. This disparity is another result of the structural obstacles women face: they are more sensitive to traffic risks, fear violence by men, often carry groceries, and take children to and from school or nursery. All of these factors mean that their first choice of transport is usually not to ride a bicycle.

Women’s participation in urban life and their use of urban transport are strongly influenced by a sense of fear. Moreover, the paths and roadways they take every day are determined by which part of the city or which means of transport feels safe, and where there is the least likelihood of being attacked.

Fostering safety

Women shouldn’t have to choose between freedom of movement and safety, and this has been recognised by a number of initiatives in southeast Europe. In places where urban mobility is most risky for women due to a culture of violence or the lack of suitable infrastructure, organisations are working to provide fundamental protection for women. One organisation that has taken up this cause is Space SyntaKs, in Kosovo. It has created a safety map of Pristina based on the experiences of women, who have largely been marginalised in the planning of urban spaces and traffic.

Security in this research is not simply a technical concept, but rather an indicator of what women depend on for their well-being and ability to function. Security starts from the right to a safe environment as a basic human right, which demands that policymakers actively address the problems women face every day in moving around the city. This research pays particular attention to subjective indicators, including feelings such as fear of any type of harassment, theft, and physical threats. It also focuses on how diverse the users of a given public space perceive it to be, and unlike previous research in this area, matches this data with objective indicators. These factors include the presence of street lighting, security cameras, public institutions, and stray dogs.

According to the research, not a single public space in Kosovo’s capital has attained even half of the maximum safety index score. Respondents expressed fear and identified threats such as verbal and physical violence by men, and these were mapped throughout the entire urban core of the city. The maps revealed that Pristina is not a safe place for women, and that the places they move in are virtually never completely safe from start to finish. Gender-responsive planning of urban areas and urban mobility begins with identifying important factors for the safe and free movement of women, as well as mapping locations where intervention can make movement safer.

Similar initiatives have taken place in Belgrade under the initiative “Don’t be afraid of the dark” by the collective Sestre, drugarice (“Sisters, friends”). This campaign is one of the responses to the question of security and the problem of violence by men against women in public spaces and transport, and it aims to map the city of Belgrade according to its “invisible boundaries” – places in which sexual attacks have taken place – and to make these places safer.

Sestre, drugarice has been effective in communicating important and alarming statistics, including that 64 per cent of women have been sexually harassed on the street, with 57.9 per cent of those being child victims aged between 13 and 17. It is particularly striking that 40.5 per cent of harassment took place on public transport. The results of an anonymous questionnaire created as part of this campaign show that public transport and bus stops are among the likeliest locations for sexual harassment incidents. Members of the collective organise women’s activist walks, advise them on how to feel safe in public spaces and on public transport, and call on women to actively help make their environment safer through “micro-actions”. One such initiative, called “Ada is ours”, saw members of the collective and the wider public take part in a feminist activist walk, tying bows around broken streetlights to get them repaired and to send the message that Belgrade belongs to women even after sunset.

According to the collective, and based on answers from respondents, the main forms of violence on public transport include verbal violence, unwanted physical contact, exhibitionism, secondary victimisation, and worse, stalking and attempted rape.¹ In order to map and recognise these types of violence, it is important to use all available platforms to inform and educate women about what they mean. Only when such violence becomes visible do we perceive it as systemic, and are thus able to challenge that system.

That said, the very act of creating a mental map of streets and ways of moving as a basis for safety, actively assessing risks, giving out advice on safety to other women, and organising movement based on assumed family obligations all fall under women’s “emotional work”. By recognising this as work, we raise awareness of women’s position, create the possibility of sharing caregiving more equally within the family, place responsibility on the institutions that create public policies related to urban mobility, and preserve women’s emotional and cognitive resources and, ultimately, their lives.

In the sphere of gender-responsive urban planning and urban mobility, there is an ongoing debate about how to create a safe environment for women. Devoting parts of public space and transport infrastructure exclusively to women is one of the short-term solutions adopted by some city administrations to address the issue of male violence against women. This institutional measure has been deemed necessary in social contexts where public transport is the only way for women to move around if they are economically or socially marginalised.

Women’s carriages have been introduced in many countries, from Brazil to Japan. In the latter, sexual violence against women on public transport is so common it even has a special term: chikan. Nevertheless, countries that have responded to the problem of violence on public transport by segregating men and women do not report a significant reduction in the number of attacks on women, indicating that this mechanism does not address the root cause of the problem.

This is precisely the basis for criticising segregation: if women-only train carriages become the norm without any other major changes in public policy – the enforcement of penalties, education, and media campaigns – segregation by gender will place additional pressure on victims, discriminate against non-binary individuals, and send a message to men that their violence will be tolerated and movement and daily life planned around it. Women-only cars and spaces must not be the sole or permanent solution; instead, the city and public transport must be reclaimed, and safety for everyone established within shared spaces.

If we want to achieve the right to freedom of movement and safety for all, we must shine a light on how unsuitable the current urban mobility infrastructure is and how much it marginalises women. Women’s lives and movement patterns show us what complete institutional neglect looks like.

In the case of Podgorica, Montenegro’s capital, apart from the lack of adjustment to gender-sensitive indicators, we can see concrete examples of how unsuitable the transport system is for women with disabilities or mobility impairments. Despite committing more than a decade ago to ensure the accessibility of buildings and streets, Podgorica has utterly failed to do so. The city’s poorly built and badly maintained streets and pavements render movement unsafe for women who predominantly shoulder the responsibility of childcare, push prams, or use wheelchairs to get around. Narrow, uneven pavements full of open manhole covers and drains; inaccessible public transport stops; steep, slippery ramps unsuited to wheelchair tyres; and tactile paving not designed for the variety of shoes women wear – these are just some of the daily obstacles women encounter when getting around. These barriers prevent access to social, healthcare, educational, and professional opportunities, further intensifying the discrimination faced by marginalised groups.

Where women win

This is precisely the basis for criticising segregation: if women-only train carriages become the norm without any other major changes in public policy […] we send a message to men that their violence will be tolerated and movement and daily life planned around it.

Vienna boasts a long tradition of gender-responsive urban mobility. Since 2000, gender equality has been a priority in the Austrian capital’s urban planning. By integrating gender perspectives in all of its policies, the city has implemented projects to improve public lighting; widened pavements to accommodate wheelchairs; enhanced visibility in streets and passageways by installing street mirrors; and added benches and seating at bus stops, along pedestrian routes, and on public transport. This strategy stems from a recognition that women rely more frequently on these ways of moving around and spend more time waiting between short-distance trips.

Vienna’s response to “trip chaining” has been to build housing units as part of the “Women-Work-City” project, designed by women for women. In these units, women who provide care within the family and community can find kindergartens, doctors, and pharmacies all in one place, thereby reducing the time spent on these caregiving tasks. The goal of this project was to facilitate the caregiving work women perform.

Meanwhile, the city of Umeå in Sweden has taken even bolder steps. Widely known as “the most feminist city” in the world, Umeå includes a gender-responsive dimension in all its urban planning. In 2019, a prototype gender-sensitive bus stop was built in the city, designed to address women’s concerns about safety on public transport. Audible and visual signals indicate that the bus is approaching the stop, while rotating wooden booths enhance visibility, allow for monitoring of surroundings, provide shelter from the wind and other weather conditions, and create a sense of security within the public space.

In addition, Umeå has undertaken other feminist-inspired spatial interventions, including benches created for play and socialisation in collaboration with and catered towards teenage girls; constructing well-lit underground pedestrian tunnels featuring large central entrances and exits, as well as rounded wall corners to enhance visibility; prioritising snow removal services based on gender, taking into account that women walk and use public transport more frequently; and clearing pavements and public transport stops before roadways. In addition, the city organises a “Gendered Landscape” tour that connects existing feminist spatial interventions with those still needed to make the city truly a place for everyone. All of this has been reinforced by education, research, the integration of gender perspectives into urban mobility data, advocacy for the equal participation of men and women in caregiving, and women’s active involvement in decision-making.

In the UK, one factor that has improved women’s safety and strengthened a culture of zero tolerance for sexual harassment on public transport is the cooperation among the British Transport Police, the Metropolitan Police, the City of London Police, and Transport for London (TfL). After a 2013 TfL survey showed that 15 per cent of women using public transport had experienced sexual harassment in the previous year, and that about 90 per cent of cases were not reported, training was organised for 2,000 police officers on the public transport network with the support of feminist organisations. Only half a year after the launch of this initiative, the percentage of reported sexual harassment cases increased by 20 per cent, and the number of cases going to trial increased by 32 per cent.

As UN Women has noted, aside from improvements to the public transportation system, the active participation of men is a crucial step in the struggle to eliminate male violence against women in public transport. To that end, in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, the organisation has also opened so-called Male Advocacy Clubs, which bring men together for the purpose of educating and promoting gender equality in various spheres. One of the media campaigns by the club targeted the problem of sexual harassment of women in public spaces. The campaign’s message about preventing this type of violence reached as many as 8.5 million people.

Mobility for all

To build truly inclusive mobility, we must reclaim our parks, streets, and public transport. Moreover, to liberate women and make their movement safer, we must begin collecting gendered statistics and mapping the intersectional female experience of living in cities. Let’s react to systemic discrimination and violence, shout, write, unite, build a network of solidarity for each other, and create systemic solutions.

As women’s right to free movement is under threat, it is important to imagine a future of equal urban mobility – one where this right is guaranteed and respected, the provision of care is shared equally, and women participate actively in spatial planning and the creation of mobility policies. In such a future, women are healthy and safe, and they can freely socialise, create, educate, and improve their lives.

“What would transportation look like if it were designed by mothers? How would streets be different if they were made for women with disabilities? Which social groups are not represented in our infrastructure, and how can we change that?” – these questions can be the start of constructive conversations about building a fairer city. In addition to marginalised social groups, men must also take responsibility and be active participants in such discussions.

At the centre of these conversations should be a gender-responsive and intersectional understanding of women’s mobility issues. After all, it is from gender studies and feminist urban theory that the criticisms of male-centred urban mobility emerged. Women’s path to reclaiming common spaces passes from there, too.

This article first appeared in Serbian in Omorika. It is republished here with permission. Translated by Alex Melbourne | Voxeurop 

1. H. Cvetičanin Knežević, Koliko je sigurna tvoja vožnja? Istraživanje o seksualnom uznemiravanju, napadima i bezbednosti žena u javnom prevozu u Beogradu (Žensko udruženje Kolubarskog okruga, 2025), p. 5-6. / How safe is your journey? Research into sexual harassment, assault and women’s safety on Belgrade’s public transport (Women’s Association of Kolubara district, 2025), pp. 5-6.  ︎

The European automotive industry is slipping deeper into crisis. While this decline has external drivers such as US tariffs and Chinese overcapacities, it is also “made in Europe” in many ways. Can new policy measures save the industry from its woes?

Since 2020, electric car sales have gained momentum, and until 2025, it was widely believed that the era of the combustion engine would soon be history.

While Europe is certainly on the way towards electromobility, this is not a linear process: there are constantly ups and downs with new concerns emerging. There is also much uncertainty in a complex and turbulent geopolitical context in which multilateralism is eroding and “zero-sum-game” perspectives are becoming dominant.

The initial fear about electromobility was that it would lead to job losses, as building battery electric vehicles (BEVs) is less labour-intensive than producing vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICEVs). While some of our earlier publications at the European Trade Union Institute demonstrate that employment loss is indeed a direct consequence of electrification in the powertrain sector – and to a lesser extent in automotive manufacturing at large – the aggregate employment effect across the entire automotive ecosystem is expected to be neutral.

Although this aspect of the transition is certainly important, the greater concern about the future of the automotive industry is how the EU can position itself in a completely new economic geography defined by the EV era and fierce geopolitical rivalries. In this context, the main question is whether EU manufacturers can maintain their core competence and market share.

The developments of the last few years indicate that this is not the case, with the EU automotive sector slipping deeper and deeper into crisis.

A crisis how deep?

With 2.5 million jobs, the automotive industry is not only the largest employer in European manufacturing  – supporting a total of some 13.6 million European jobs – but its transition is also the most complex. The green and digital transformations it faces are intertwined with global value chains that are fully exposed to changing geopolitical realities.

Although fast-track electrification started out as a policy-driven process, there is already a strong business case for the industry to embrace it, and the future competitiveness of each automotive location depends on its ability to adopt the new technology. Unfortunately, it has taken a very long time for incumbent EU car manufacturers to realise that their leading market position in combustion engine technology – and diesel in particular – is not transferable to the era of electric vehicles, where much of the added value will come from batteries and software. Dysfunctional emissions regulation and zig-zagging industrial policies have not helped either.

Transport is the only major sector in the EU economy in which greenhouse gas emissions have risen rather than fallen over the last few decades: since 2010, emissions have grown by 9 per cent. Reversing this trend to meet the EU’s 2040 emissions target and achieve net-zero by 2050 is a formidable challenge.

The reasons for this failure are multiple. The European policy framework for the decarbonisation of road transport has been far from optimal, often hindering the green transition by favouring large and expensive vehicles. Many European carmakers have also been slow to embrace the shift to electromobility, and now face a loss of market share in both domestic and export markets.

Despite this, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) reported a 1.8 per cent increase in new car registrations in 2025 compared to 2024, even though the number remained 17 per cent below the 2019 level. In the first half of 2026, a further increase of 5.7 per cent took place.

Since 2020, the share of petrol and diesel vehicles in car sales has continued to fall, reaching 22.2 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively in the first half of 2026. Meanwhile, the share of hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) grew to 37.2 per cent in the same period, and that of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) reached 9.2 per cent. Most importantly, sales of fully electric vehicles picked up again in 2026 to reach 20.7 per cent.

These trends illustrate that, while the initial momentum in the shift towards electromobility has been broken, the trend is again upward. But is Europe reaping any benefits?

The number of cars produced in the EU grew modestly (by 0.3 per cent) in 2025 (up in Germany and France – by 2.3 per cent and by 15.5 percent respectively – but down in Italy by 22.9 per cent). At the same time, production numbers in 2025 remained 18.7 per cent below the 2019 level, again with significant differences between countries (down by 10.3 per cent in Germany, 38 per cent in France, and 56.7 per cent in Italy).

The automotive industry’s woes become more apparent when looking at the latest trends in foreign trade of cars. While the EU maintains a significant trade surplus in the sector (76 billion euros in 2025), the number shrank by nearly 9 per cent last year. It is noteworthy that 2025 was the first year when the EU’s balance in vehicle trade with China turned into a deficit (with 15.1 billion euros in imports and 8.5 billion euros in exports).

The picture looks worse if we look at the trends with the EU’s two most important trading partners, China and the US. Compared with 2024, EU exports (in value) to the US in 2025 shrank by 21.4 per cent, while exports to China saw a staggering 43-per cent drop.

The import side does not look any better, although here a big difference appears between the value and volume of imports. In 2025, total EU car imports from China only grew by 4 per cent when measured in euros, but when measured in volume (number of units), the increase was 30.7 per cent, reaching over one million cars. In other words, cars imported from China surpassed the number of cars produced in France that year. Data for 2026 show an acceleration of the increase. For instance, imports in May 2026 grew by 65 per cent compared to the same month last year. Figure 2 also shows that, between 2021 and 2025, the number of cars the EU imported from China grew by 270 per cent.

A further concern in Europe is that China’s share in the European car market is rapidly increasing, having reached 7 per cent in 2025, up from 5 per cent the previous year. Data for the first half of 2026 reveal that China’s share increased further to 10 per cent. This means that the expansion of the EU market in 2026 benefited manufacturers in China, while EU manufacturers suffered a 3-per cent market share loss (with Japanese carmakers also losing 2 per cent).

This is worse than it may initially appear. A report by the Rhodium Group shows that despite punitive tariffs introduced from October 2024, sales figures for made-in-China BEVs in 2025 ​​bounced back to pre-tariff levels. At the same time, the sale of Chinese-made PHEVs and ICEVs – which are only subject to the 10-per cent basic tariff – accelerated. A recent report by Transport & Environment (T&E) supports the view that the 2024 tariffs backfired, showing that they only curbed imports of China-made EU BEVs. While, as of early 2026, made-in-China cars dropped to 17 per cent of BEV sales in the EU, down from a peak of 22 per cent in 2024, the decrease is due to fewer imports of China-made EU cars. The share of Chinese brands in made-in-China car imports grew from 35 per cent in 2024 to 54 per cent by early 2026. T&E also projects that without further policy change, weaker EV targets in the EU would increase the market share of Chinese carmakers in 2035 to 30 per cent of BEV sales in the bloc. 

European manufacturers’ loss of market share also results from their choice to focus business strategies on premium market segments, abandoning the production of smaller, more affordable entry-level electric cars. If the European automotive industry cannot produce affordable clean EVs, this will not only add to inequality in clean mobility but also pose a threat to high-quality jobs in European automotive manufacturing.

EU policy responses

In March 2025, the European Commission launched its Industrial Action Plan for the European automotive sector to boost demand for European EVs. The plan includes a law to green corporate fleets and measures to encourage national incentives schemes and social leasing for electric cars. The declared objective is to maintain a strong European production base and avoid strategic dependencies.

However, the Commission caved in to industry lobbying, providing flexibility regarding CO2 targets. An amendment to the CO2 Standards Regulation for cars and vans enables car manufacturers to meet their compliance targets by averaging their performance over a three-year period (2025-2027), offsetting shortfalls in any one or two years with excess achievements in the other year(s).

The EU Automotive package, launched at the end of 2025, also chose short-term competitiveness over long-term goals. It opened possibilities for plug-in hybrids, range extenders, and ICEVs to remain part of the automotive landscape beyond 2035. The International Council for Clean Transportation estimates that this could slow down EV adoption, with BEV shares expected to drop from 61 to 44 per cent by 2030. Regarding corporate vehicles, mandatory targets are set at the member state level to support the uptake of zero- and low-emission vehicles by large companies. In the run-up to 2035, carmakers will benefit from “super credits” for small, “affordable” electric cars made in the EU.

Meanwhile, the Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) proposal published in March 2026 seems more like damage control than a strategic initiative. Made in Europe (MiEU) criteria are limited to public interventions and procurement decisions and do not include labour conditionalities. EVs will be required to have green steel, while 70 per cent of their components, excluding batteries, will have to be produced in the EU.

The main purpose of the initiative is to put made-in-China vehicles at a disadvantage in Europe, and to address the growing use of Chinese components in European vehicle production. As Europe struggles to build a competitive battery industry, European carmakers are increasingly sourcing inputs from China. Beyond defining content thresholds and determining what countries (beyond EU member states) will qualify as having MiEU origin, a major challenge is how these requirements would actually be applied in the sector and what exactly the scope of the measures will be. Once the IAA is finalised and the transition period has passed, member states would be required to procure MiEU vehicles exclusively as part of their public procurement, to restrict financial incentives (both EV grants and as part of corporate fleets) to Made in Europe vehicles, and to provide CO2 supercredits only to small BEVs made in Europe.

Several important factors limit the IAA’s effectiveness. Timing is one, as measures are not expected to take effect before mid-2027. Scale is another, given that public procurement accounts for less than 2 per cent of the passenger car market. Supercredits for small BEVs and low-carbon steel requirements matter less for Chinese firms, as they generally have strong CO2 fleet balances. On the other hand, the Corporate Fleet proposal is particularly important. From 2028 onward, member states would be allowed to provide financial support only to corporate fleets operating low-emission and EU-made vehicles. Notably, this would not fully lock Chinese exporters out of the largest demand segment, but put them at a significant disadvantage, and around 30 per cent of the market would remain fully open. And even within the protected segments, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) would face higher costs to remain eligible for support due to local content requirements. It is also uncertain whether EU manufacturers would be able to provide all the required elements of the value chain.

In summary, measures of market protection would indeed raise a barrier for Chinese manufacturers, but the EU is still lacking in bold, forward-looking, actionable initiatives to prop up European producers. For instance, the bloc’s 1.8-billion-euro Battery Booster Facility is modest when held up against the investment needed to close gaps with global competitors.

As the bankruptcy of Northvolt – a flagship EU project – and the subsequent cancellation of more than 100 GWh of battery capacity illustrate, what the EU automotive industry needs most is investment and innovation; protecting the status quo will not help. Short-term, defensive measures, such as the decision to give carmakers two extra years to comply with the 2025 car CO₂ emission targets, are harmful. The weakening of the zero-emissions target in 2035 is an even bigger blow, as it opens the door to high-emission combustion engine vehicles and undermines the future competitiveness of EU carmakers in electromobility, in particular with regard to Chinese BEVs. These are confusing signals both to the industry and consumers, and divert investment away from electrification at a time when European manufacturers urgently need to catch up with Chinese EV-makers. OEMs have already written off tens of billions of investments into electric vehicle development and launched new combustion engine projects.

Trade unions fight back

Even if 2025 was not a year of crisis in terms of production and sales for the EU automotive sector, it certainly was so in terms of employment. Loss of market share and competitiveness is putting the future of EU automotive jobs at risk.

While the number of car registrations and vehicles produced in the EU in 2025 grew somewhat, production value has seen a downward trend over the last several years. In Germany – the EU’s biggest producer and market – production value in 2025 shrank for both car makers and suppliers (down by 1.1 per cent and 4.3 per cent respectively). Employment fell sharply too: manufacturers cut 18,000 jobs (3.6 per cent of all positions), while suppliers laid off 29,000 (11 per cent of employees). Employment trends were also downward in the EU as a whole, with the European Association of Automotive Suppliers (CLEPA) reporting 54,000 losses among EU suppliers for 2024, and a further 22,000 in the first half of 2025.

A series of layoffs and company closures illustrates this trend, as a Eurofound study from early 2025 shows. In 2024, restructuring announcements in the EU automotive industry were dominated by job contraction, with a forecast net loss of 53,669 jobs in the EU, not including Volkswagen’s December 2024 announcement about a 35,000 reduction of its workforce in Germany by 2030. In 2026, Volkswagen management was considering expanding the workforce reductions up to 100,000 by 2030. Further examples include the closure of Audi Brussels in February 2025, which led to a loss of 3,000 quality jobs, and the shutdown of Ford Saarlouis in Germany in 2025, affecting 3,600 employees. But how have trade institutes responded?

In Germany, IG Metall – the country’s dominant metalworkers’ union – and works councils have sought to expand their existing repertoire of collective bargaining and company policy instruments in order to co-manage change. In this regard, collective agreements for securing the future and competitiveness (in short, “future-oriented agreements”) have emerged as the main tools to protect workers’ rights. The 2021 round of collective bargaining in the metal and electrical industries provided works councils, IG Metall, and employers with a collective framework to regulate measures to realise innovations, improve competitiveness, reskill employees, and achieve their continued employment. IG Metall has carried out successful projects to tap into new, previously unorganised workers, such as at the Tesla factory near Berlin. It has also managed to foster creative and disagreement-led company target-setting processes, including at the Mercedes site in Marienfelde, near Berlin. Moreover, works councils at Mercedes have successfully expanded the scope for codetermination.

In terms of content, future-oriented agreements comprise three elements: first, concessions on the part of employees, for example on the subject of working hours; second, a temporary exception from redundancies in operational areas. These processes form the framework for the third element, namely negotiations conducted jointly by management and works councils on the future use of the individual sites. Although these processes are organised at plant level, they are integrated into the coordination structures operating within the company. This practice provides proof that managing change in a forward-looking manner is possible. That said, future-oriented agreements don’t guarantee success.

The developments of 2024 in Volkswagen, where management withdrew from longstanding job security commitments, illustrate this clearly. In an unprecedented move, the company announced it was considering two plant closures in Germany, putting aside the employment guarantees contained in its “2016 Pact for the Future” that was viewed as an example of codetermination and responsible just transition practices. In December 2024, Volkswagen AG, IG Metall, and the works council reached a final agreement on a socially responsible reduction of the workforce by more than 35,000 across the company’s German locations by 2030.

On the other hand, collective social agreements are not a new collective bargaining instrument, but one that has experienced a revival in the wake of site closures and transformation-related pressure on workforces. This is demonstrated by recent collective bargaining disputes at various Continental and Vitesco sites; at the Ford plant in Saarlouis, where production came to an end in 2025; at the Japanese supplier Musashi; and at the supplier GKN Driveline.

The collective social agreement concluded by IG Metall for the closure of the Ford plant in Saarlouis is one of the most comprehensive and generous among such agreements in Germany. Out of the 3,600 employees affected, 1,000 will be kept until at least 2032 and assigned to different projects (Ford car parts and battery recycling, among others), while 1,400 workers will move to a transfer company for further qualification and skills development (18 to 24 months with a compensation of 80 per cent of their previous salary). The rest of the workers are entitled to severance payments.

The stakes

The particular challenge for the automotive industry is that it is undergoing multiple and intertwined changes at the same time, including decarbonisation, the digitalisation of both product and process, the automation of production, and the complete reorganisation of automotive value chains. This is leading to fierce competition between production locations for new developments, with decisions often being focused on labour costs and resulting in relocations and job losses.

How workers can shape the complex restructuring processes of the European automotive industry is decisive for making this transition just, as well as for achieving zero-carbon mobility. Despite its lower labour demand, electrification is the lesser threat to EU jobs; what is most important is how (and to what extent) EU manufacturers manage to keep up with clean mobility needs. This is about re-defining the competitiveness of a key industrial sector in the new era of electromobility under geopolitical pressures from both the East and the West.

In a turbulent and challenging geopolitical environment, market protection is necessary and useful only if it is instrumentalised to foster innovation and technological catching up. Carrying on the old business model of building ever bigger, heavier, and more expensive cars (even if often under hybrid or plug-in hybrid cover) would be a massive failure. Giving up already binding legislative commitments, like the 2035 ban on combustion engine cars, is not only bad for the climate but also jeopardises the medium- and longer-term future of European automotive jobs.

Policy also needs to push towards a more comprehensive transformation of mobility systems. The whole system of national subsidies for both the production and sale of BEVs must be reconfigured to support more affordable BEVs and electromobility services, with a clear priority for social groups most dependent on cars and, recently, most excluded from car ownership.

From Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin to Rachel Carson, Murray Bookchin, and André Gorz: the anarchist tradition understands ecology not as top-down conservation, but as a practice of cohabitation. Simon Guyomard and Édouard Jourdain trace this overlooked lineage through to today’s ZADs and Rojava, and ask what it means to inhabit the world without dominating it.

Although a consensus is forming as to the necessity of an ecological approach, ecology has been politically neutered and, in many cases, appropriated by state and commercial worldviews. As a result, there is an urgent need to reexamine the critical traditions that have theorised the relationship between nature and society, not as a matter of management or expertise, but as a fundamentally political question.

Among these traditions, anarchism’s unique contribution is often overlooked. Yet it was one of the first approaches to think about human emancipation and the preservation of the environment as two inextricable dimensions of the same societal project. This link can be traced back to the very first formulations of anarchist thought in the nineteenth century.

Anarchism thus enables us to think about ecology in a different way: not as top-down conservation policy, but as a founding practice of cohabitation, in which questions of power, ways of inhabiting the world, and the legitimacy of authority play out.

Ecology without masters

From the very early stages of Europe’s industrial revolution, radical criticisms were made of the effects of industrial civilisation on the environment and on human beings. Utopian socialists like Charles Fourier were quick to critique the ravages of capitalism on nature. Dominant socialist lines of thought, particularly Marxism, did not dwell on ecological issues.

It was the anarchists who developed the first real arguments connecting the conditions of emancipation to the preservation of the environment. While this crucial conception can be read into the works of the early anarchist thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, the true theoretical foundations of the convergence of anarchy and ecology were laid by two anarchist geographers towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) was a French geographer exiled as a Communard. He was the author of the monumental Nouvelle géographie universelle (1875–1894) (published in English as The Universal Geography) and L’Homme et la Terre (1905–1908). Reclus’s geography and anarchism were intrinsically linked: understanding human societies, he believed, required an understanding of how they fit into their natural environment. This led him to develop the concept of mesology, which took account of the settings in which various organisms interact.

Anarchism was one of the first approaches to think about human emancipation and the preservation of the environment as two inextricable dimensions of the same societal project.

His magnum opus L’Homme et la Terre is considered one of the first formulations of political ecology avant la lettre. Reclus could already see the ravages of industrial agriculture and of capitalism on environmental balances. The quality of human life, he wrote, depends on our societal choices regarding the earth: “The truly civilised man, understanding that his own interests are bound up in the common interest and with that of nature itself, acts in a completely different fashion. He repairs the damage committed by his predecessors, helps the earth rather than brutally attacking it, and works to beautify as well as improve his land … Having become both ‘the conscience and consciousness of the earth’, the man who is worthy of this mission thus takes on a share of responsibility for the harmony and beauty of the nature that surrounds him.”¹

Reclus’s concept of the relation between humans and the environment was thus inseparable from an ideal of social justice. Being aware of the interconnected nature of different forms of domination, he was also a vegetarian and a feminist. His influence was later rediscovered by the libertarian ecologists of the 1970s, who saw him as their forerunner.

At the same time, the Russian prince-turned-anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) was developing a naturalistic approach to social theory. Like Reclus, Kropotkin was a geographer by training and had explored Siberia. He was struck by the cooperation he observed in nature. In 1902, he published Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, a work of popular science in which he opposed the Social Darwinism of his time. Kropotkin highlighted the importance of cooperation and mutual aid in the animal and human worlds, seeing it as a natural law just as fundamental as laws of competition.

For Kropotkin, the spontaneous cooperation in nature acted as the empirical foundation of anarchism: if mutual assistance was a factor in evolution, he reasoned, then libertarian social structures founded on voluntary association and mutual aid were not only moral, but in accordance with human nature.

Kropotkin not only transposed natural laws onto society but also developed a critique of nineteenth-century industrial centralisation. In Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899), he suggested decentralising production by combining agriculture and industry at the local level, in order to reduce the waste and alienation resulting from large-scale capitalist industry. Foreshadowing modern ecological ideas, Kropotkin advocated for a society made up of a collection of autonomous communities that satisfied their own needs in a sustainable manner, by integrating agricultural and manufacturing work, and returning to local short supply chains.

These two writers are among the figureheads of a tradition which was remarkable among other socialist schools of thought from the middle of the nineteenth century for the way it integrated ecology into a revolutionary perspective.² These anarchists focused primarily on practical interdependencies, which led them to see nature not as a trove of resources to be exploited but as a collection of human habitats integral to how societies worked. Rather than an anthropocentric vision of dominating nature through reason, the anarchists espoused an ethics of cohabitation, with politics rooted in ecosystems themselves.

Their radical rejection of the state, understood as a hierarchical structure of seizure, standardisation and separation, went hand-in-hand with an early critique of modern land management, authoritarian planning, and government. They saw the state as a rapacious power that destroyed the organic forms of human societies and their relationships to their surroundings. This political approach to land led them to imagine forms of ecological federalism, where each community would adapt to its own ecological conditions, as opposed to an administrative universalism that ignored the diversity of environments.

Another link between anarchists and political ecology is in their relationship to technology. Rather than a promethean fascination with mechanisation, the anarchists had a warier attitude influenced by direct experience of the alienation of workers and the dispossession of artisans. By railing against all-out productivism, they differentiated themselves from the mainstream forms of socialism that, to varying degrees, conflated human liberation with an indefinite increase in the ability to transform the material world.

Anarchism valued a frugal lifestyle, technological autonomy and self-sustainability uncoupled from the quantitative obsession with growth. The relationship between early anarchism and science was also different to the technocratic instrumentalism that prevailed in a certain strain of Marxism: rather than relying on a single foundational body of knowledge, they favoured a vernacular epistemology, including practical know-how and sensory understanding, rejecting academic science’s claims to a cognitive monopoly.

The anarchist conception of history thus differed fundamentally from linear historical materialism, in which the progress of productive forces was the key to historical development. Anarchists rejected the idea of an arrow of time leading inevitably from ancient to modern: for them, history was full of forks in the road, about-turns and situations in which the old and the new coexist. This refusal of teleological temporality opened up the possibility of an ecological conception of time, sensitive to cycles, rhythms, and regenerations.

From the 1890s to the 1910s, activists advocated for changing our way of life away from industrial capitalism: return to the land, nudity, healthy eating, etc. This movement, referred to as anarcho-naturism, gained some popularity among individualist anarchists during the Belle Epoque. In France, a grouping of libertarians known as “les naturiens” coalesced around publications such as Le Naturien, in which theorists such as Henri Zisly and Georges Butaud advocated for “deserting industrialism” and a radical return to the natural wild. Rejecting bourgeois conventions, they enthused about life in small rural communities, vegetarianism, and nudity, and denounced the modern city as artificial and corrupting.

In Spain, anarcho-naturalism was at the heart of the libertarian movement in the 1920s and 1930s. At the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (“the National Confederation of Labour”, CNT) in Zaragoza in 1936, just before the Spanish Revolution, the delegates even discussed the status of naturist communities in future society. Aware of the presence of many vegetarians and nudists among the Andalusian anarchist peasants, the CNT planned to allow these groups to live outside of industrialisation and to negotiate specific economic agreements with them. Many Spanish anarchist peasants had in-depth knowledge of their local environment, which they sought to preserve while also improving communal productivity, rejecting the brutal methods of capitalist agroindustry.³

In Mexico, libertarians such as Ricardo Flores Magón linked the fight for Tierra y Libertad (“Land and Liberty”, a popular slogan and the title of his 1916 play) to the protection of communal indigenous land from capitalist exploitation. In Argentina and Brazil, anarchists also took part in peasant demonstrations against excessive deforestation and land-grabbing by foreign companies.

Anarchists saw the state as a rapacious power that destroyed the organic forms of human societies and their relationships to their surroundings.

Peasant, vernacular, and insurrectionary ecology was not a knee-jerk conservative defence of the old ways, but rather a form of political innovation where the self-management of land, the pooling of resources, and the reclaiming of agricultural know-how were part of a broader conceptualisation of the ecological reshaping of the social world. As the anarchists got to grips with the ravages of capitalism and the exodus from the countryside, the ecological question was transplanted into the very structures of the towns and cities. As town planning began to emerge, the rejection of domination was connected with a reflection on spatial forms of liberty.

From municipalism to the ZADs

From the 1950s onwards, early warning signs of the ecological crisis began to appear: chemical pollution, runaway urbanisation, nuclear threat, and more. Then, in 1962, the American writer Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a bestseller that denounced the destruction that pesticides wrought on nature. That same year, Murray Bookchin, an American militant anarchist, pseudonymously published Our Synthetic Environment, which attracted less attention, but offered a radical critique of industrial pollution and capitalist productivism. A worker-turned-teacher, Bookchin was one of the very first people to formulate a comprehensive ecological critique from a revolutionary perspective.

In a 1964 article, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”, Bookchin stated that ecological critique must form an integral part of social critique: the survival of humanity required a revolution to abolish not only capitalism, but also humanity’s domination of nature. His key idea, which he developed in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) and other works, was that the ecological crisis was rooted in society’s hierarchical and authoritarian structures. Thus, “what literally defines social ecology as ‘social’ is its recognition of the often overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems.”⁴ In other words, humanity’s domination of nature follows from the domination of humans over other humans.

In order to reach a balance between humans and their surroundings, Bookchin envisaged a society structured by cooperation between natural communities (i.e. communities not delineated by the state or a coercive political authority). This would be achieved through libertarian municipalism, in which the citizens of a community would control economic production in order to meet their basic needs and preserve the environment.

This idea led other anarchist thinkers to focus on the concept of regions. The American anarchist Peter Berg, for example, coined the term “bioregionalism”. This perspective was shared by all the libertarian thinkers engaging in political ecology (Jacques Ellul, Bernard Charbonneau, Ivan Illich, etc.), who “wanted to build, here and now, decentralised, self-administering, and self-governing societies on a human scale. Rather than a sudden, dramatic revolution, they wanted to establish a parallel structure of small, self-managing groups, brought together on an affinity model.”⁵

The degrowth movement that followed the publication of The Limits of Growth in 1972 also had strong libertarian underpinnings, theorised in the French context by André Gorz, who put forward a radical critique of the society of work and consumption. Gorz advocated for individual autonomy, which he saw in terms of self-determination of a sufficient standard of living, and warned against the appropriation of the ecological emergency by the state or companies in order to increase technocratic and capitalist domination. Today, figures such as Serge Latouche and Paul Ariès advocate for re-localisation, direct municipal democracy and the abolition of consumer society, positions that are very close to Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism or Kropotkin’s communalism.

In the 1960s and 1970s, an assortment of social experiments brought together libertarian ideals and ecological issues, via rural intentional communities such as Longo Maï in France and self-managing urban projects. These collectives rejected private property, settled on land where they practised organic agriculture, developed sustainable artisanal technologies, and lived outside of capitalist systems. At the same time, local environmental battles, especially over the Larzac, forged alliances between farmers, ecologists, and libertarians, and involved radically democratic forms of civil disobedience. This transnational dynamic sketched out the rudiments of a practical eco-anarchism, anchored in the land, defying state control, and inventing eco-technological, non-hierarchical forms of collective living.

The 2010s saw the emergence of the phenomenon of zones à défendre (“zones to defend”, ZADs), the most famous of which was in Notre-Dame-des-Landes near Nantes from 2009 to 2018, in which wooded wetlands were occupied to prevent the construction of an airport. Within an alternative microsociety of around fifty dwellings spread over 1,600 hectares, the inhabitants of the ZAD organised themselves into horizontal communities of about a dozen people. Each established comprehensive self-management of the territory they occupied: decision-making general assemblies, temporary dwellings, collective farms, bakeries, and freely accessible workshops.

Many saw the ZAD as an enduring experiment in self-sufficient anti-capitalist society, emphasising collectivity, voluntary simplicity, and care for the earth. ZADs also took root in Sivens (against a planned dam), Bure (against a nuclear waste storage depot), and elsewhere. Each of these occupations was a concrete instantiation of the intersection of the ecological struggle (preserving wetlands, forests, etc.) and the anarchist project (inventing ways of living without the state or private property).⁶

Nevertheless, the ZADs were controversial even within the anarchist movement, as had sometimes been the case with the free communities in the nineteenth century: Is it realistic to seek to create spaces within territory that remains under state control? Would it not be better to concentrate on more comprehensive strategies to subvert capitalism? Such debates are also found throughout the ecologist movement, as demonstrated by the foundation of Extinction Rebellion in 2018, with anarchist tracts advocating for a break away from the state and the economic system in favour of local, self-managed solutions.

The collective Les Soulèvements de la Terre (The Earth Uprisings Collective, SLT) has struck out in a different direction, with a horizontal and protean organisation inspired by libertarianism. It was created in 2021 and became a household name in France after the widely reported demonstration in Sainte-Soline in March 2023. The SLT campaigns bring together anarchist militants and ecologists, forming common cause with local social struggles while seeking to disarm those responsible for the ecological catastrophe. The collective, which practices direct action and civil disobedience (occupation, sabotage, etc.), has hundreds of local committees, all of which are active in society with the support of trade unions, political parties, and environmental associations.⁷

Freedom is not something that is taken from the world, but is instead part of it, allowing unique forms of life to coexist in the long term without dominating one another.

The twenty-first century has other large-scale testing grounds for the eco-anarchist ideal, although we must be careful to understand the nuances of specific situations. One of the most notable is what has been attempted in Syrian Kurdistan. In 2012, the Kurdish population began to put in place a democratic confederalist system explicitly inspired by the ideas of Murray Bookchin. The autonomous cantons of Rojava have local assemblies, agricultural cooperatives, and egalitarian people’s militias. Their goal is to establish a feminist, ecological, and democratic society, without a nation-state, in extreme conditions. Despite war and blockades, Rojava has begun reforestation, permaculture and environmental education programmes, as well as measures to reduce dependence on oil; it has also created agricultural cooperatives, communal nature reserves, and renewable energy projects, all managed by grassroots communes.

Living without dominating

Where classical Marxism(s) subordinate ecological questions to the development of productive forces, and liberalisms naturalise the exploitation of resources in the name of progress, some libertarian thinkers have constructed an integrated critique of social domination and our domination over nature. In opposition to anthropocentric and productivist ways of seeing the world, they have developed an ecopolitical vision of autonomy, combining social justice, rootedness, an ecosystem-wide focus and horizontal institutions.

But anarchism and ecology cannot be resolved into a stable synthesis, or one treated as a simple thematic addition to the other. Instead, the place where they meet is an essential locus of tension, in which the fundamental questions of political thought play out in ever-changing forms: What is a habitable world? How legitimate is authority? What structures are fair and just for whole ecosystems and enable living beings to live alongside one another?

The major theoretical advantage of anarchism is found in its close links with ecology, precisely because it prevents these questions being answered based on the standard categorisations of modern politics. As Baptiste Morizot indicates, “It is quite another matter: it is the call of the interdependences which indicate the limits to the range of possibilities that the human democratic collective can explore.”⁸

Neither the abstract individual of liberalism, nor the organic community of nationalism, nor even the teleological dialectic of Marxism, offers a sufficient foundation from which to operate. The standard tools of sovereignty, law and contracts cannot encompass the entire natural world. It is thus necessary to re-politicise materiality, treating it not merely as a simple natural constraint, but as an ontological framework of which human institutions are one modulation among others.

From this point of view, anarchism, which thinks about power as a contingent relationship, is particularly well-suited to thinking about ecological normativity. It is not a question of basing norms on nature (which would descend into authoritarian naturalism), nor of constructing yet another green doctrine, but rather of making ecology a pragmatics of the communal, of sufficiency. It is a radical critique of established forms of power, capable of opening up a fresh direction in which freedom is not something that is taken from the world, but is instead part of it, allowing unique forms of life to coexist in the long term without dominating one another.

This article first appeared in Esprit, published in cooperation with CAIRN International Edition. This English version is taken from Eurozine.

1. Élisée Reclus, “De l’action humaine sur la géographie physique”,  Revue des deux mondes, no. 54 (1864): 763, accessed December 3, 2025, https://www.revuedesdeuxmondes.fr/article-revue/de-laction-humaine-sur-la-geographie-physique/. ︎
2. See Serge Audier, La Société écologique et ses ennemis: Pour une histoire alternative de l’émancipation (La Découverte, 2017). ︎
3. See Chris Ealham, Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937 (AK Press, 2010). ︎
4. Murray Bookchin, “What is Social Ecology?” in Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, ed. M.E. Zimmerman (Prentice Hall, 1993), 354. ︎
5. Patrick Chastenet, Les Racines libertaires de l’écologie politique (L’Échappée, 2023). ︎
6. See Sylvaine Bulle, Irréductibles: Enquête sur des milieux de vie, de Bure à Notre-Dame-des-Landes (UGA Éditions, 2020); and Margot Verdier, Le Commun de l’autonomie: Une sociologie anarchiste de la ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes (Éditions du Croquant, 2021). ︎
7. Juliette Piketty-Moine and Noé Sotto, ‘Les Soulèvements de la Terre: Reportage dans un comité local,’ Silence 528, no. 1 (2024): 38. doi:10.3917/sile.528.0038. ︎
8. Baptiste Morizot, Ways of Being Alive, trans. Andrew Brown (Polity, 2022). ︎

How can one truly grasp the experience of war – “the omnipresent, everyday, tangible, arbitrary possibility of a battlefield, of a destroyed house, of flight, of famine, of abduction, of a violent death” – without witnessing first-hand its violence and devastation? Through memories, recollections, and speaking to the families of Israeli victims of the 7 October attacks and Palestinians trapped under Israel’s bombs in Gaza, Tel Aviv-based musician and writer Ofer Waldman searches for help in words. An edited excerpt from the book Verkämpftes Land (2025).

Here I end my days, helpless, and nothing, nothing I could have done or not done, willed or thought, could have led me to a different goal.

– Christa Wolf, Cassandra

I would much rather tell you something else. To write something down – something proper – and then search out the life that matches the written words.

Poet Lea Goldberg believed that in times of war, it is the poet’s duty, above all else, to write about flowers and children’s laughter. She wrote that in Tel Aviv in September 1939, just after World War II had broken out. Tanja Maljartschuk, the Ukrainian poet-in-exile, says that she no longer trusts language: language that is suited both to writing down poems and writing out orders for war and murder. Somewhere between these two extremes, I would have liked to tell you something else.

What story, then, am I to tell you?

I have not been on any battlefield. My house has not been destroyed. I did not have to starve, I did not have to flee, and I was not abducted. And yet life here knows an intimacy with the thoughts of war. And it is not because one spent countless hours in a shelter, surrounded by children, family, friends, even complete strangers, thinking of the people in Gaza who have neither houses nor shelters, or of the Israelis in the Kibbutzim whose shelters on 7 October could not protect them and rather became gateways to hell. All of us here will, as Serhij Zhadan once said, never again be able to look at the sky as we did before. For war – that is, the omnipresent, everyday, tangible, arbitrary possibility of a battlefield, of a destroyed house, of flight, of famine, of abduction, of a violent death – leaves behind certain traces. It is of these traces that I want to tell you. To search for them through words.

These are not words of courage, nor are they words of self-torment. Had I been in Gaza, I might not have written a sentence such as: “One cannot distinguish the smoke of the intercepted rockets from the autumn clouds.” Instead, my eyes – had I raised them to the sky – would have brimmed over with concrete dust, with ashes, and become blind. I would have written about undrinkable water and the stench of death. But I am not in Gaza. I direct my gaze there – not to please you, or to please myself, but because I know that all other gazes, including the gaze turned inward, are conditioned by one another. That is, also by this gaze toward Gaza. But I am not in Gaza. No more than you are.

In Terry Gilliam’s film Twelve Monkeys, which is based on Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée, a time traveller is sent into the past to prevent an apocalyptic pandemic. The entire plot revolves around one key scene: the moment when the protagonist, James Cole (played by Bruce Willis), and his partner, who are trying to find the source of the pandemic, run into a boy, who is in fact Cole’s younger self. At the very moment they meet the boy, they realise that they have been following the wrong lead all along. But before Cole manages to warn his younger self of what is to come, the police, who have been pursuing them, shoot him.

The climax of the scene is the moment when Cole’s partner, a young, bewildered woman, holding Cole in her arms, stares at the boy with pleading terror as she grasps what is happening: Cole is bleeding to death, and it is too late to warn the boy – the young Cole, who will later be sent back into the past and will fail again and again to avert the dystopia – about his future.

(Time travel, anyhow: the drift into the surreal, a pause in the presumed logic of reality, the escape into an imaginary world to shut oneself off from the real one. To confront the insane through insanity itself, to name it. That too – and of that as well – I want to tell you.)

We all constantly try to trace the seeds of dystopia through poems, plays, essays, novels, and history books; and then, once we have found them (too late), we try to call them out. Our frequent failures make us no less secure; quite the contrary, we are sometimes bowled over by an omnipresent, almost brazen self-assurance as the sky around us darkens. These words are not self-assured. They are the gaze of the woman who knows she is doomed to fail. They are the gaze of the boy peering into his own future, fated to grasp it too late.

And yet these words are also the brief lingering over the gaze between the woman and the child. A lingering ascribed with the possibility – also arbitrary, painfully arbitrary – of recognition. Thus, along with every stratum of war laid upon this land, clinging to its people, the layer of this arbitrary possibility is laid. Lingering. Creating space, sometimes almost surreal, but nameable. Visualisable. Describable.

Stuttering

I start over again.

“I’d like to hear my new work read aloud,” says S. from Berlin, and asks me to read it together. I’m in Israel, so we start a video call. Before we begin, S. asks if it might be too much for me right now –  that is, if I can read, write, think at all about literature at this time.

“Why would it be too much?” I ask. “I thought the play was about the war in Ukraine, about family history, about your grandfather.”

“It is about my grandfather, too,” S. says. “But it’s also about 7 October. About Israel. About Gaza.”

I wave it off. When is it a good time, anyway?

“Let’s read.”

I start over again.

It’s a beautiful spring day. My brother sits in front of me on a rickety garden swing, rolling a cigarette. I hold his lighter, hand it to him.

“I thought Y. wasn’t in Gaza,” I say. Y. is my brother’s eldest son. “I thought he was at a base near the border. He’s not a combat soldier.”

“He’s a medic, serving the battalion commander. When the commander goes in to assess the situation, he has to go in too.”

The things he saw in Gaza. The air there. The sounds.

My brother looks at his hands, as if searching for words. He spreads his fingers, and the cigarette falls on the ground.

I start over again.

The moderator has just introduced me. I’m on stage in Frankfurt and am supposed to read from letters I wrote to a friend in the first weeks of the war. I take the microphone and look out at the hall again, at the expectant faces, at the tense faces.

Pronouncing the words becomes more difficult with every sentence. I draw in breath, shape my lips to speak the sounds I see before me: “child,” “air,” “sound,” “ashes”. But hardly anything comes out. I have to thrust the words out between my lips with increasing force. I have to tense my diaphragm with a direct command from my head, to push the air out through my mouth. At some point, it doesn’t matter whether it comes out as words, or as barking, or a scream.

I recognise this feeling from my time as an orchestral musician. Among brass players, it’s called “airlock”. Breathing in and out in time with the music, you place the mouthpiece on your tensed lips, position your tongue just behind your front teeth, and wait to play the note. As you’re about to play it, the tongue must retract to make way for the flow of air generated by your breathing muscles. But sometimes the tongue baulks at the command from your head and sticks, creating an airlock that leads to a kind of stutter when you start playing. Or the tongue does not move at all, and you have to skip the passage in whole or in part because the orchestra does not wait, it cannot wait, it must play on. Your eyes track the unsounded notes on the paper, your ears register the void of your own missing notes amidst the orchestra’s onward playing. In your mind, the world shrinks to the tip of your rebellious tongue, to the pressure building in your lungs and throat, to the blood flooding into your face. To the onrushing feeling of failure.

You want to join in the music, to fall into its rhythm. But sometimes you have to pull the instrument away from your lips. Breathe out. Try anew.

Start over again.

So I start over again.

* * *

“The music – the music helps,” says A. from Kibbutz Kfar-Aza. “The singing.”

Three of us – A., her husband, and I – are sitting in the lobby of a Tel Aviv hotel. She’s about to tell her story from 7 October to a group from Germany, but we still have a little time before she starts. For now, A. sits across from me, a glass of cold water in her hand, and repeats a few times that music helps.

“I have been asked,” she says – and now her eyes, her faint smile, try to break free from her face, pressing themselves as if through crusted earth  – “I have been asked,” – that crusted earth around her eyes and mouth begins to show cracks and long, deep wrinkles – “I have been asked how I felt at my son’s funeral, my mother-in-law’s funeral, my brother-in-law’s funeral, the funeral of…”

Her husband gently interrupts her, placing one hand on the back of his other hand and rubbing them: “At the funerals,” he says. “Just say: ‘At the funerals’.”

Her objectivity lies in counting off; his lies in reducing to the essential. One feels their connection, their love.

“Yes.” The encrusted earth around her mouth cracks open. “At the funerals.”

Speaking was difficult for her, A. said, but singing came more easily. And so they went from one funeral to the next, her daughter playing guitar, A. singing. I did not dare ask what she sang.

“I played music myself for a long time,” I tell her.

“What instrument did you play?”

“The French horn,” I say.

“Netta, our son, played the violin,” says A. “He loved Peter and the Wolf, and always wanted to hear it again and again as a child.” The torn, crusted earth wrinkles and cracks; the backs of the hands rub together. “He wanted to be Peter, and that’s why he chose the violin.”

I search for words in my head, what to say now. “It’s interesting,” I say (stupid word). “It’s interesting, which instrument people choose – that is, what character from the fairy tale: Peter, or the wolf, the hunters, the grandfather, the duck, the cat, the bird. What these characters say about us.”

“So you’re the wolf?” A.’s husband repeats the word again, “wolf”. I want to utter my standard line: that, as the wolf (a character whose music is played by three French horns), I have frightened many children already. Thankfully I remain silent and risk a smile.

“Netta was definitely Peter,” says A. “The hero of the story. He didn’t always follow the rules either.”

Embarrassed, I hum Peter’s melody: tam-tam-ta-ta-tim-tam. Hebrew has only one word for “protagonist,” “main character,” and “hero” – gibor. A. uses this word for her son only when she refers to him as Peter from the fairy tale. She does not use it when she is recounting the moment he threw himself on a hand grenade to save his fiancée, as she will soon tell the group from Germany in the same gentle, matter-of-fact voice. The cracks in the encrusted earth close, leaving delicate cobweb-like patterns around her mouth and eyes, trapping the sounds within them, tam-tam-ta-ta-tim-tam.

* * *

I experienced for the first time what is called an “airlock” while speaking at a solidarity event in Berlin. I was joining remotely from Israel and was supposed to say something, read something aloud. My reading included a poem by Yehuda Amichai: El male Rachamim (“God Full of Mercy”).

El male Rachamim, 

ilmale HaEl male Rachamim 

haju HaRachamim BaOlam WeLo rak bo.

God full of mercy,

were God not full of mercy,

there would be mercy in the world, not only in him.

I drew breath, shaped the first sound – “E” – and stalled. The words caught in my throat. I tried to clear it to get the air flowing again. It did not help. The audience in Berlin flickered on the screen in front of me. Had they noticed anything? Were they already irritated? I was slipping out of the rhythm of the words. Trying to counteract, to fall back into the rhythm, I started tapping my foot, an old musician’s exercise.

1, 2, 3, 4.

1, 2, 3 (breathe out), 4 (breathe in), “E”.

“E”

“E”.

El male Rachamim. God full of mercy.

1. 2. 3. (Breathe out). 4. (Breathe in).

* * *

Scarcely to be found in the Israeli newspapers are accounts of what life is now like for the people in Gaza. I know the figures – the number of dead, wounded, starving; the number of destroyed houses. I see the images of endless landscapes of ruins and dust. Yet everything feels secondhand, far away. I search for a voice behind the images and numbers; I want to hear such a voice, within my own four walls, to face it.

The few people I know from Gaza now live in Germany. So I ask a Palestinian friend from Nazareth to connect me with M., an acquaintance of his from the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza that he has spoken about many times.

M. is an English teacher. He and his family are now sheltering in Khan Younis – their fifth stop since the outbreak of the war. Each time the bomb strikes draw closer, he tells me later in conversation, they flee further. But the Gaza Strip is narrow. There is no real escape and no safety.

M. sounds like someone describing what it is like to be trapped in a cage with a predator. It is about constantly trying to anticipate which corner the predator will move toward next. But beyond pressing oneself against the bars of the cage (pulling one’s own children close), there is nothing one can do.

My first attempt to arrange a conversation with him fails.

“We’ll talk tomorrow, Wednesday,” he writes.

“Tomorrow is Thursday,” I write.

“What time?” he asks. “What time is it where you are right now?”

And I think: But we should be in the same time zone – he’s only 170 kilometres away from me in Tel Aviv (I wanted to know exactly how far away he was. At first, the app responded: “Route cannot be calculated.” I switched to the straight-line function, which gave me 170 kilometres).

Later, during our call, fighter jets fly over my head, and I wonder: how long does a fighter jet take to cover a straight-line distance of 170 kilometres? How long before the thunder stops over me and starts roaring over him?

I write to him: “Same time as Gaza.”

He does not reply.

When we do finally talk, I first ask him about the sense of time. He thinks for a moment.

“It took me 15 years to build my house. It took only a few seconds to almost completely destroy it with a single artillery shell.” 1, 2, 3, 4.

I scroll through my messaging apps. Every day, dozens of appeals pile up there – for donations and acts of solidarity, for Jewish-Arab gatherings, for wounded Israeli soldiers, for protecting aid convoys to Gaza from attacks by radical settlers, for the families of the hostages, for dispossessed Palestinian communities, for internally displaced Israelis, for the bereaved, for children, widows, for lonely elderly parents.

In the evening comes a call for a rally in the north of Israel to end the war and release the hostages. It’s not too far from where I live. I put on a black shirt that says “De-Mo-Kra-Tia” (a relic from earlier times) and drive there. Since the outbreak of the war, GPS jammers have been deployed across the entire region to make it harder for enemy rockets to locate their targets, and I find the place with difficulty.

The last kilometre I cover on foot. The closer I get to the demonstration, the more people I see heading for the same place. Some wave flags, some carry banners with anti-government slogans, and others wear shirts with anti-war messages. There aren’t many of us. Onlookers in cars and on street corners follow us with tired eyes; some curse us, insult us as traitors, wish us death – but they do so with weary gazes and hollow voices. They receive no response and expect none; everything feels like a compulsory exercise, like a ritual worn thin and emptied out.

Later, at the rally, an elderly man stands at the edge of the crowd, leaning on a cane to which a limp Israeli flag is tied. He is weeping to himself, silently. He cries throughout the entire demonstration, never once looking toward the stage or at the angry speakers. Instead, his eyes, reddened by tears, gaze into the crowd without fixing on any particular point. Only when the mother of a hostage begins to speak does he briefly straighten up and turn his face toward the stage. He listens to her speak, in short sentences, of her days and nights. The demonstrators at the rally fall silent almost at once and stand as if frozen. The only sound to be heard is the flapping of flags in the light wind. The mother’s voice, carried by loudspeakers, is scattered and absorbed by the low walls enclosing the square, breaks against shop windows, police cars, and the huge billboards. She reaches the end of her speech. Around me, people open their mouths to shout. I open my mouth too, again and again, not knowing myself whether I am trying to shout or gasping for air.

* * *

Mohammed Al-Rimlawi was one of the students in the English club that M. had founded in the Jabalia refugee camp. A few weeks ago, Mohammed’s mother went with his youngest sister in search of one of the increasingly scarce power sources to charge her phone. When they returned, their house was no longer standing. Mohammed, his father, one sister, and two brothers lay buried under the rubble.

Once more a factual, objective listing. Again I search for words.

I enquire about the English club. The students in the club (boys only) are between 10 and 14 years old.

“There are hardly any foreigners here in Gaza,” M. says. So, to offer them a window onto the world, he has built an international network of mentors who practice English with the students over video calls.

“All they know is Gaza,” he says about his students. “I don’t want that. That’s not good.”

In the meantime, the school has been partly destroyed, and the students have fled with their families to sites throughout the Gaza Strip. He keeps coming across them, by chance.

“What questions are they asking right now?”

“They are not asking any questions,” he says at first. The sunburned faces of the children – the majority live in tents run by aid organisations and spend most of their time outside – remain expressionless, their mouths closed. I press him. This cannot be; after all, children ask questions; that’s what children do: they ask questions. (What questions do my children ask.)

M. thinks for a moment. Then he says:

“When.”

That is what they are asking.

When.

Exhale. Inhale.

1,2,3,4.

This text is an edited excerpt from Ofer Waldman’s book Verkämpftes Land (Wallstein Verlag, 2025). Translated from the German by Anton Baer | Voxeurop.  

In just a few years, support for “remigration” – an illegal project to deport migrants, refugees and citizens who are deemed “unassimilated” – has moved from the fringes to the fore of political discourse. In Italy, this dynamic has been enabled by collaboration between the far right in government and extra-parliamentary groups. How to resist the normalisation of extremist ideas when the debate keeps shifting further to the right?

Around 500 far-right politicians, activists, and influencers gathered in Porto last May for the second edition of the “Remigration Summit”. The first had been held a year earlier in Gallarate, not far from Milan. In April this year, Milan also hosted the demonstration “Fearless! In Europe, we are masters in our own home”, organised by the European far-right party Patriots for Europe. In June, a pro-remigration march took place in Rome, reportedly attended by around 4000 people. Two weeks later, on 30 June, the “Comitato Remigrazione e Riconquista” (“Remigration and Reconquest Committee”) filed a citizen initiative bill on remigration, collecting over 130,000 signatures (well above the 50,000 required).  

All of these initiatives reflect the growing popularity of “remigration”, which, according to the summit’s promoters, aims to “prevent population replacement through the reversal of migratory flows, thereby restoring the sovereignty, independence, and identity of countries, through the defense of their ethnocultural specificity.” In practice, remigration means the mass expulsion of irregular migrants, but also asylum seekers, refugees, and other legal migrants and citizens deemed “unassimilated” into the dominant culture – that is, people who are non-white and Muslim.  

From the fringes to the institutions 

The Remigration and Reconquest Committee brings together various strands of the extra-parliamentary, anti-democratic, and neo-fascist far right, including CasaPound (whose members have proudly called themselves “the fascists of the third millennium”), Veneto Fronte Skinheads, Brescia ai bresciani, and the Rete dei patrioti. But remigration has also been popularised by prominent figures within the institutional Right, particularly the League.  

Led by Transport Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, the League is the second-largest force in the three-party governing coalition. It remains a key player in regional politics in Northern Italy, but has in recent years lost many of its supporters to Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. In an attempt to stem its losses, the League has increasingly radicalised on identity issues.  

So far, this strategy hasn’t worked. In February, Roberto Vannacci – an army general elected to the European Parliament with the League in 2024 – left the League to found a new party, Futuro Nazionale (“National Future”). Vannacci, who has been criticised for his homophobic, racist, and fascism-revisionist statements, is among the staunchest supporters of remigration, and accuses the government and the League of being too moderate and too willing to compromise. National Future is currently polling above 7 per cent, ahead of the League and just behind Forza Italia, the junior coalition partner.  

Although remigration remains, for now, a minority project, its political rise has already created a climate of tension. In January, for example, during a press event at the Chamber of Deputies for the launch of the popular-initiative bill on remigration, a member of Rete dei patrioti handed a fake plane ticket to journalist Youssef Hassan Holgado, who is of Spanish and Egyptian origin. “I was there as a journalist and was given a ticket to ‘remigrate’ to my country of origin,” recounts Hassan Holgado. “As a journalist, I have the rhetorical tools to defend myself against accusations and attacks. But that gesture is an insult to all the people of foreign origin who might not have the tools to defend themselves against this barbarity.”  

The press conference, organised by League MP Domenico Furgiuele, was later cancelled after dozens of opposition lawmakers occupied the chamber, singing the anti-fascist anthem “Bella ciao” and holding up copies of the Italian constitution. In April, the 32 MPs who had taken part in the protest were suspended for blocking the event. In June, Furgiuele left the League to join National Future.  

Both in Italy and Germany, […] provisions stipulate that no one may be stripped of their citizenship on political grounds. Born from the resolve never to repeat Nazi and fascist persecutions, these principles are now being challenged across Europe.

Racism and conspiracy theories 

Italy, with two far-right parties in government, represents an important laboratory for the European Right. But the movement to normalise remigration as a political project dates back much further. One of its ideological antecedents is the theory of ethnopluralism, advanced by French thinkers from the Nouvelle Droite and the Research and Study Group for European Civilisation (GRECE), founded in 1968 by Alain de Benoist. Rejecting universalism – the idea that all people share a common human worth – ethnopluralism legitimises a form of apartheid based not on explicit racism, but on the idea that peoples have fundamental, unbridgeable differences, and must therefore live in separate ethno-cultural regions.  

“The ideological core [of remigration] is nativism, the idea that nation-states should be populated by natives,” says Mattia Zulianello, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Trieste and an expert on populism, radicalism, and political extremism. He explains nativism splits into three strands: “Economic nativism holds that immigrants steal jobs from natives; welfare chauvinism claims migrants drain resources without contributing; and symbolic nativism sees migrants – especially Muslim migrants – as a threat to traditions and customs.”  

Linked to these ideas is also the conspiracy theory of the “Great Replacement” articulated by another French writer and intellectual, Renaud Camus. In his 2011 book Le grand remplacement, Camus argues that mass immigration into Europe is part of a plan to end white European civilisation. Camus’s racism is also steeped in antisemitism: he claims a “globalist elite” made up of Jewish political and financial figures, along with the progressive world, is carrying out the transnational design of the “Great Replacement”.  

Leonardo Bianchi, a journalist, writer, and author of the newsletter Complotti! (“Conspiracies”), argues that the conspiratorial and ideological dimension lies at the heart of remigration as a political proposal: “It isn’t just about expelling migrants, but above all about stripping civil rights from citizens deemed ‘unassimilated’, meaning those who hold European passports but, in the movement’s own terms, aren’t ‘native’ – that is, not white and not Christian. 

Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far-right Front National, helped spread Camus’s ideas. In his book Mémoires, he claimed that the “Great Replacement” is a fact and that the white world is dying. Over the years, Camus’s theory spread across Europe and reached the United States through the “alt-right” movement. It also inspired the perpetrators of terrorist, xenophobic massacres, such as the 2019 Christchurch attack in New Zealand.  

Parties and influencers  

The vocabulary of remigration emerged alongside the spread of Camus’s ideas. According to Zulianello, the first movements to talk about remigration, in the Netherlands and Belgium, were classic extreme-right groups: skinheads and ultras of varying degrees of extremism. But the idea initially had little traction.  

Among institutional political actors, Geert Wilders (the Eurosceptic and Islamophobic founder of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands) and the Flemish nationalist party Vlaams Belang (“Flemish Interest”) were among the first to adopt the term between 2011 and 2012. Following the 2015 refugee crisis, the discourse on migration shifted rightward, and parties like Fidesz in Hungary began spreading Camus’s theories. As recently as 2022, during his inauguration speech for his fourth and final term as prime minister, Viktor Orbán said: “I see the great European population exchange as a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilisations – migrants.” 

In Denmark too, the idea that migrants were siphoning off social resources meant for native citizens took hold in the political agenda. “Welfare chauvinism originated with the Dansk Folkeparti [“Danish People’s Party”], which then prompted other parties to follow suit, as they sought to replicate successful strategies,” says Zulianello. The theme later spread across various far-right parties in Europe. “The current wave owes to Alternative für Deutschland”.  

On 25 November 2023, AfD members, businesspeople, entrepreneurs, doctors, fraternity members, and even some figures from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) gathered at a hotel on Lake Lehnitz, near Potsdam. Martin Sellner, an Austrian neo-fascist ideologue and influencer, set out the strategy needed to normalise remigration, a long-term project meant to unfold over decades. He also spoke of a “model city” in North Africa where two million people would be relocated (that is, deported). The parallels with the Nazi plan to deport four million Jews to Madagascar are clear. The Potsdam meeting was meant to remain secret, but it was exposed by the independent investigative outlet Correctiv.  

“This theory isn’t harmless,” Bianchi comments. “As a project, it undermines the constitutions of European countries, which are founded on the fundamental principles of the post-World War II era. Both in Italy, under Article 22, and in Germany, under Article 16, these provisions stipulate that no one may be stripped of their citizenship on political grounds.” Born from the resolve never to repeat Nazi and fascist persecutions, these principles are now being challenged across Europe: by Chega in Portugal, Vox in Spain, and Reform UK in the United Kingdom.  

According to Zulianello, Europe’s radical right has also influenced its American counterpart, which in turn has helped mainstream the idea of remigration. After Elon Musk’s 2023 acquisition of Twitter, violent content circulated more freely, giving greater visibility to figures like Sellner. A report by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate found a spike of 71000 mentions of the term “remigration” on X between 1 and 8 September 2025, following coordinated posts from Musk himself and other prominent far-right figures, such as Dutch influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek.  

Donald Trump, too, has invoked and carried out expulsions of migrants, explicitly using the term “remigration” on the official channels of the Department of Homeland Security. But according to Zulianello, the real driving force behind this movement remains Europe.  

“What’s interesting about the Italian case,” says Zulianello, “is that the proposal didn’t originate from a party, but from a far-right network – the Comitato Remigrazione e Riconquista”. As Bianchi points out, the Committee’s proposal “follows Martin Sellner’s plan to the letter, which sets out three steps: the deportation of irregular migrants, the restriction of the right to asylum and family reunification (which are also long-standing causes championed by the League), and voluntary remigration, which is anything but voluntary and targets all so-called ‘non-assimilated’ people.” 

The citizen initiative bill submitted in June aims to “regulate” migratory flows in order to combat irregular migration and exploitation. It proposes establishing a national “remigration Programme” to crack down on NGOs (allegedly “involved in migrant trafficking”), reduce flows of foreign workers, encourage the “return of Italian descendants”, and create a fund to boost Italy’s birth rate. These measures would be financed through a “remigration fund” of 500 million euros per year, raised through NGO asset seizures, a tax on remittances, and funds currently allocated to asylum policy. However, the proposal’s central problem isn’t economic but legal and constitutional: remigration openly violates the anti-fascist principles of the Italian Constitution and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.  

According to Zulianello, the initiative’s promoters “know that the proposal as it is is simply not feasible. What matters to them is getting the issue onto the agenda. By mainstreaming certain topics, the space for debate widens, and mainstream parties tend to want to fill that vacuum, effectively legitimising the issue and hardening anti-immigration policies.”  

The effects are already visible. A security package approved in April included an amendment that offered financial rewards to lawyers who successfully carried out voluntary repatriation procedures for migrants. Legal controversy over the measure later forced the government to amend it.  

Resisting normalisation 

Tickets to the Remigration Summit in Porto cost between 45 and 325 euros – a price justified by the stakes, according to the organisers: “With remigration, Europe will become more European day by day. Without remigration, it will become less European every day and will eventually cease to exist.” But the Europe imagined by remigration’s supporters – which is moving closer to the mainstream, also thanks to the cooperation between the centre-right and the far-right in the European Parliament – isn’t the only possible Europe. Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union states that “The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.” 

According to Bianchi, opposing remigration and the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory means, above all, refusing to allow their normalisation as “common sense” proposals. “The term ‘remigration’ sounds neutral because it comes from the social sciences, but it’s an act of linguistic normalisation: its meaning and its origins are inseparable from the political project behind it.” 

Heatwaves and climate disasters are exposing Europe’s infrastructure crisis, requiring a massive ramp-up in investment. Policymakers are turning to private finance to fill the gap, believing that only small amounts of public resources will be necessary to unleash the capital needed. But this approach entrenches the interests of private capital at the expense of citizens while limiting the influence of the state. Instead, what Europe needs is an evidence-based, state-led infrastructure strategy.

In October 2024, torrential downpours hit Valencia, leading to catastrophic floods with devastating consequences, destroying homes and businesses, wrecking roads and rail lines, and submerging cars. The event was a human tragedy, in which hundreds of people lost their lives, and many others lost their livelihoods. It also revealed a painful truth: Europe’s infrastructure is not fit for the changing climate. The floods caused total direct damages of over 18 billion euros. To put this into context: Spain’s annual infrastructure investment deficit (that is, the difference between current and needed spending) is estimated to be around 19 billion euros per year. This means that a single storm caused damage equivalent to around one year of Spain’s infrastructure investment gap. 

The problem goes beyond climate adaptation. Across Europe, countries are struggling to maintain deteriorating infrastructure and build new projects. Recent high-profile failures, such as the collapse of the Carola Bridge in Dresden in September 2024, should make this crisis impossible to ignore. The bridge collapsed due to corrosion and material fatigue, yet renovations were only scheduled for the following year.  

Governments are also struggling to find money for renovating and building schools, hospitals, and electricity grids.  

Everyone appears to agree on the need for more infrastructure investment, but the prevailing question is: who is going to pay for it? In answering this question, policymakers are falling for the private finance myth: the idea that the market will finance our essential public services. 

This is happening at EU and national levels alike. The Competitiveness Fund proposed by the European Commission as part of the next EU budget, for example, specifically aims to attract private investment, including for infrastructure projects. Similarly, the Germany Fund launched by Berlin in early 2026 aims to mobilise 130 billion euros in private investment for a major expansion of public infrastructure and defence capabilities.  

At first glance, this strategy may sound effective. If the private sector shoulders the bulk of Europe’s infrastructure investment, public resources can be allocated to other essential needs, such as social welfare and education. However, contrary to what policymakers would have us believe, private finance does not come for free. 

Socialising risks, privatising profits 

Private investors expect returns commensurate with the risk they take. When it comes to infrastructure, these returns must come either from the people who use that infrastructure (through energy bills or road tolls, for instance) or from public contracts and subsidies. Whether the upfront investment for the project is financed by the public or private sector, it is always eventually paid for by some combination of billpayers and taxpayers. 

Moreover, many socially beneficial infrastructure projects require huge upfront investment without necessarily delivering high profits. For example, a new metro line requires billions in upfront construction costs, takes decades before it generates any return, and in most European cities never turns a profit at all.  

To get private actors to invest, governments therefore need to provide incentives. This is called derisking. Through deregulation or by providing public funds, for example in the form of a guarantee, public authorities aim to adjust the risk-return profile of investments. The German federal government, for example, is backing the Germany Fund with public funding and guarantees totalling around 30 billion euros. The problem with derisking is that it is often done today without any meaningful conditions in place, as also pointed out by former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta. This leads to socialising the risks while privatising the profits: if an infrastructure project is successful, the private sector collects the profits; if it fails, the public shoulders the costs. 

The Castor underground gas storage plant in Spain is a prime example of derisking gone wrong. The project, built off the Mediterranean coast by the privately owned company Escal UGS, had to be shut down in 2013, before it even entered commercial operations, because it triggered hundreds of earthquakes along the coast of Valencia and in Catalonia’s Ebro Delta. Even though the company was to blame, the Spanish government had to compensate it with a 1.35 billion-euro package. This is because public authorities had derisked the investment, agreeing that the state would compensate shareholders in the event of a shutdown, even if the shutdown was due to negligence or deceit traceable to Escal UGS. The Castor gas project is just one of many in which citizens bear the costs, while private investors are shielded. 

There is no straightforward economic evidence that private finance is better for taxpayers or billpayers. If infrastructure projects can generate revenues for private companies, they can also do so for the public.

Private finance won’t save us  

It is arguably true that some amount of private finance is useful for Europe’s infrastructure investment needs. The problem with the private finance myth is that it claims private finance should be the default option, ignoring its shortcomings and the potential benefits of public or alternative models. 

Our recent research at the New Economics Foundation shows that there is no straightforward economic evidence that private finance is better for taxpayers or billpayers. If infrastructure projects can generate revenues for private companies, they can also do so for the public. Instead of bearing the costs that come with subsidising a privately owned project, by retaining full ownership of the project, the public could ultimately see a long-term fiscal return. The remunicipalisation of Hamburg’s electricity grid is one such example. In 2024, it generated profits of around 109 million euros for the city. 

In terms of cost efficiency, consumer prices, employment conditions, and service delivery, private ownership is often not the better choice. Privatisation has been linked to higher electricity prices, increased job precarity and cuts in the postal industry, and decreased preparedness for the Covid-19 pandemic in hospitals across Europe. While investors profit, workers and citizens bear the costs. 

Private capital, by its very nature, allocates funds to areas where returns are highest, rather than where need is greatest. 

There are at least four structural factors which can explain why the private sector generally charges higher bills, while investing less in job and service provision. 

First, the cost of capital for the private sector is generally much higher. Most EU governments currently borrow at 3.5-5 per cent on a 30-year bond. Private infrastructure funds, by contrast, typically target returns of 12-16 per cent or more. This determines what equity investors demand when committing capital to a project, and what users or taxpayers ultimately have to cover through bills or public subsidies. 

Second, incentive structures differ. Private firms are motivated by profit, whereas public authorities typically pursue broader social objectives, like income redistribution or public health. The Corporate Europe Observatory, for example, found that the privatisation of healthcare across Europe has led private providers to “cherry pick” lower-risk and higher-paying patients over higher-risk and lower-income patients. 

Third, many infrastructure sectors, such as water or electricity grids, are natural monopolies. A natural monopoly exists where a single provider can supply the entire market at a lower cost than any combination of competing firms, typically due to high fixed costs and significant economies of scale. A report by Common Wealth on the UK’s major electricity and gas distribution networks, for example, revealed that, amid the cost-of-living crisis, companies were able to exploit their natural monopolies, paying dividends to shareholders totalling between 2.4 and 3.6 billion pounds from 2017 to 2021. 

Lastly, while effective regulation can mitigate some of the above failings, recent decades have been marked by a lack of regulation. And the trend is moving in the wrong direction as the Commission pursues deregulation across the board, ranging from the energy system to digital technologies and food safety.  

No government policy can fully resolve these structural issues. Private capital, by its very nature, allocates funds to areas where returns are highest, rather than where need is greatest. Societally vital and environmentally necessary investments that do not meet return thresholds are simply not considered. An overreliance on private finance thus does not just risk delivering worse outcomes; it also entrenches a logic in which the boundaries of what is possible are drawn by investors, not citizens. This makes it essential for society to take conscious decisions about where and how private finance should play a role, rather than delegating broad swathes of infrastructure finance and delivery to the private sector by default.  

Evidence-based approach 

Rather than sticking to a misplaced loyalty to private finance, policymakers should apply a systematic approach to determining whether and when public or private delivery better serves societal interests.  

Instead of focusing solely on immediate public spending, policymakers need to consider the full bandwidth of financial considerations: project delivery costs, revenue streams, and financing costs. Additionally, wider economic effects, known as “multiplier effects”, need to be incorporated, as infrastructure projects can raise economic activity and tax revenues in the surrounding area.  

Importantly, non-financial considerations also need to be included. Factors like environmental consequences, the local benefits of community ownership, and strategic motivations, for example public ownership of the energy grid to ensure energy security, must be part of an informed decision. Otherwise, governments will continue to hand over critical infrastructure to private actors, with detrimental long-term effects on society and the environment. 

This requires broader changes to macroeconomic policy to address the underlying causes of underinvestment. Decades of austerity and stringent fiscal rules have created a self-perpetuating cycle. As governments cut public investment and outsource to the private sector, they lose the institutional capacity, expertise, and leverage to deliver infrastructure themselves, becoming increasingly dependent on private actors and less able to dictate their terms. 

The fact that austerity impedes rather than spurs economic prosperity has also been highlighted in a recent publication by the International Monetary Fund. They show that, on average, austerity policies aimed at reducing public deficits can increase debt-to-GDP ratios due to the negative impacts on tax receipts and economic activity. To break this cycle, governments must rethink their approach and design fiscal policy to accommodate public infrastructure investment, where it is deemed in society’s best interest.  

A threat to democracy  

Infrastructure is not just a financial asset – it is foundational to a functioning society. It determines how we move, how we learn, and how we are cared for. These decisions should not be made by the market, but through democratic deliberation.  

As governments cut public investment and outsource to the private sector, they lose the institutional capacity, expertise, and leverage to deliver infrastructure themselves, becoming increasingly dependent on private actors and less able to dictate their terms. 

The state not being able to provide the infrastructure its citizens need is a threat to democracy. This has also been pointed out by the German conservative minister of transport, Patrick Schnieder, in connection with the dire state of the country’s railway network. We also see this unravelling in Valencia, where the far-right party Vox used the floods as a springboard for both anti-government and anti-climate rhetoric.  

Valencians will be heading to the polls next year. Recent projections place Vox in the lead with 24.4 per cent – a doubling of what they currently have. At the same time, experts warn that infrastructure improvements following the floods have been lagging behind, meaning that there is no guarantee that the same could not happen again. Rather than outsourcing our collective future to actors with no democratic mandate to shape it, the public must be given back control. 

Following the 2015 Paris Accords, the climate movement rode a wave of cultural and political momentum, culminating in the European Green Deal. But war, inflation, and a resurgent fossil fuel-aligned Right have triggered a fierce backlash against climate action in all its forms. To win this fight, Florent Marcellesi argues, Europe must treat energy sovereignty and climate justice as two sides of the same battle.

The economy works in a series of cycles. Be they short (according to Joseph Kitchin), medium (as per Clément Juglar), or long (as Nikolai Kondratieff declared), periods of recovery, of creation, of boom and bust, or of destruction follow one another. The cycle begins anew, in infinite loops that are never quite the same.

Similarly, the just and green transition faces its own distinct historical cycles. Since environmental awareness emerged as a political movement in the 1960s and 1970s, it has gone from being an outsider issue for socially conscious minorities to becoming – following the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the focal point of the socio-political mainstream. Today, however, mercilessly besieged by resurgent imperialisms whose interests align with those of fossil fuel capitalism, the transition faces an enormous backlash. It is waging an fierce struggle against the “fossil fuel empire”, gasping for air so that the existential threat that it currently faces does not turn into destruction. But how can the just transition withstand this backlash and consolidate itself within the new world (dis)order? And, how can it defeat the fossil fuel empire?

The birth of a new hegemony

2015 was no ordinary year in our recent history. On 12 December of that year, the Paris Agreement was unanimously adopted at COP21. Although it was by no means a perfect climate accord, by enshrining in an international treaty the 1.5°C global warming limit that humanity must not exceed, this agreement marked a turning point in climate action. The Paris Accords were driven by a broad coalition of aligned nations (the Pacific Islands, the EU, Obama’s United States, etc.), a Vatican motivated by Pope Francis’ Laudato si’, and a civil society keen to turn the page on the failed COP15 summit in Copenhagen.

2015 represented the start of a new cycle in which climate was no longer a subordinate and secondary issue but the centre of media attention, a political and social priority, and the new driving force behind an emerging economy centred on the transition and on renewables. Put another way, the year marks the start of a period with a profound capacity for structural transformation and for reshaping collective principles, guided by the climate narrative in public opinion, institutions, and the business world: climate cultural hegemony.

After years of recession and social and economic austerity, this shift in hegemony had a tremendous impact on several fronts. On the one hand, activism played a key role in the cultural and social dynamics in favour of climate action, thanks to the quantitative and qualitative presence of the youth climate movement. Behind Greta Thunberg, the central figure of the climate movement – someone with an almost messianic quality and a source of global inspiration for an entire generation – lay an unprecedented visibility of the climate cause in the media and on the streets. This movement positioned the climate as an existential issue – for young people and any group or nation directly suffering its impacts – and a matter of the highest socio-political priority. As hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of Berlin, Brussels, Melbourne, New York, Vancouver, and Madrid in 2019, the climate cause seeped into the recesses of European and global collective consciousness.

2015 represented the start of a new cycle in which climate was no longer a subordinate and secondary issue.

Following the path opened by Paris, activism began to reflect on in politics and institutions. On 5 December, 2016, the Darebin in Australia became the first city in the world to declare a “climate emergency”. In May 2019, the UK Parliament became the first national parliament to do so, while Spain officially followed suit following a cabinet decision in January 2020. To date, nearly 2,400 local authorities across 40 countries, covering a population of up to one billion citizens, have declared a climate emergency, making climate change one of the top political priorities in the years following 2015. Inevitably, this social and institutional visibility also had its impact at the ballot box: in the 2019 European elections, riding and simultaneously pushing the climate wave, Green parties achieved a historic result, securing more than 80 seats and transforming their eco-social agenda into a driving force within the European Parliament.

This, in turn, triggered greater environmental momentum. Under the combined pressure of activists on the street and of voters, and despite the fact that it was not even part of the European People’s Party’s electoral priorities at the time, the newly appointed European Commission under the first presidency of the conservative Ursula Von der Leyen, put its main response on the table: the Green New Deal,or the European Green Deal. The debate no longer revolved around whether or not we needed a climate policy, but rather the level of ambition it should have. Although the deal fell short of what the environmental movement and scientific community were calling for, it was far ahead of anything proposed by other geopolitical blocs. The EU established itself as a climate leader, committing to reducing its emissions by at least 50 per cent by 2030, whilst making the goal of carbon neutrality by 2050 legally binding.

What is more, all European policies – whether in energy, industry, or agriculture – were required to integrate or align, at least in spirit, with climate priorities. In this climate-friendly environment, the economy felt the winds of change from the energy transition and sustainability, the cornerstones of post-Paris business. The end of coal mining in Spain and its phasing out across Europe, the accelerated roll-out of renewable energy, the boom in electric cars, the decarbonisation of industry, and the greening of agriculture: the green economy and green jobs experienced a golden age, whilst the just transition was gaining ground. Paris, the youth climate movement, and the electorate made their mark; climate cultural hegemony was at its zenith.

But every golden age comes to an end, and every high-water mark is followed by a decline. The first blow came from Covid-19. The health crisis, along with its lockdowns, brought the “climate generation” to a screeching halt, and since 2020, there has not been another mass climate demonstration. Despite depriving it of one of its most powerful means of expressing itself, the pandemic did not stop the European Green Deal from becoming the EU’s guiding light. On top of that, thanks to the social and political capital accumulated in previous years, and despite the emerging opposition from the radical right in Hungary and Poland or the anti-climate presidency of Trump’s first administration, the green transition was established as one of the pillars of the NextGenerationEU Recovery Funds. Of the 275 billion euros in capital investment, 42 per cent of the funds were to be allocated to tackling the climate crisis. This represented a tangible investment in the great transformation from a fossil fuel system to a renewable one.

But soon after the first blow of the pandemic came a second one in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Apart from exposing Putin’s imperialist ambitions and Europe’s dependence on Russian gas, the war also triggered a surge in energy prices and the cost of living, in turn fuelling social unrest. Reactionary and denialist forces smelt blood. The European Green Deal was still alive, but through the wounds of the pandemic and war in Ukraine, the anti-climate and anti-ecological transition narrative was seeping in, establishing itself as a key pillar of the fossil fuel backlash.

The empire strikes back

Whether at the political, cultural or economic level, we have entered a new cycle: that of the ecological backlash, countering progress on environmental issues. It is the era of the crusade against and relentless attack on a just transition, as the empire of dirty energy and its political network make every possible attempt to reinforce their foothold. In other words, fossil fuel capitalism, in collaboration with a reactionary and denialist international movement, has declared a war –  an almost holy war – against ecological progress in all its forms.

While environmental activists are branded as “terrorists” or “climate fanatics” and climate change is, according to Trump, nothing more than “a hoax”, green policies are constantly under fire from climate-sceptic and far-right organisations. Alongside immigration, they have made the Green New Deal their enemy to be defeated in Spain, Brussels, and internationally. They portray, against all evidence, environmental policies as responsible for the more than 200 deaths caused by the 2025 storm in Valencia. They also attack renewables every day, whether during the 2025 blackout on the Iberian Peninsula or by fuelling local opposition to wind and solar energy.

In this context of constant disinformation and attacks, where the far right provokes and the Right reaps the rewards (and part of the Left flirts with reactionary attitudes towards it), ecological setbacks are rife within institutions. For example, in Europe, where the dividing line between conservatives and neo-fascists has been growing increasingly thin since the 2024 European elections,¹ environmental commitments have been scaled back. This includes sustainability requirements in the Common Agricultural Policy, as well as environmental restrictions for large companies and the ambition to phase out fossil-fuelled cars.

At the same time, environmental deregulation – which allows for more products that are harmful to nature and health but economically competitive and good for the coffers of large multinationals – is gaining momentum. What is more, in an Orwellian move, the US Government, having once again withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and from any international political or scientific institution fighting for climate action, has even banned the terms “climate change” and “emissions” in federal agencies and official national documents. This includes revising educational programmes. Beyond politics, the cultural battle is all-out.

The ecological backlash is proving to be an attempt at a fossil fuel restoration in the face of the 21st-century renewable energy revolution.

After years of climate hegemony, the backlash has been and continues to be inversely proportional to the progress of the ecological transition in recent years. Indeed, just as the restoration of the monarchy was a response to re-establish the interests of the nobility in the face of revolutionary and republican ideas in the 19th century, the ecological backlashis proving to be an attempt at a fossil fuel restoration in the face of the 21st-century renewable energy revolution. This is an unmistakable sign that the just ecological transition has hit a nerve. For fossil fuel capitalism, the ecological transition was tolerable as long as it remained sectoral and socio-economically marginal. But today it has become a major obstacle to its businesses, which are currently worth 97 trillion dollars – almost as much as global Gross Domestic Product. It also represents a threat to part of the global elite and population whose way of life and values, based on fossil fuels and the fantasy of unlimited growth in production and consumption, remain non-negotiable.

In this regard, the 2025 US National Security Strategy (NSS) is emblematic of the attempt to return to the fossil fuel-based world order. As well as reverting to imperialist ideological and geopolitical doctrines based on hard power and spheres of influence, authoritarianism, and Western supremacism, the document does not beat about the bush or use euphemisms. In opposition to “the disastrous ideologies of ‘climate change’ and ‘net zero’”, its aim is to “restore US energy dominance (in oil, gas, coal and nuclear power)” and “expand US access to critical minerals and materials”. In this context, the military operation in early 2026 in Venezuela has been the US’s first test of ideological hegemony and control over natural resources within its sphere of influence. Emboldened by the apparent success of this strategy, Trumpist imperialism has stepped up the pace, attempting to subdue the Iranian regime as well, which, incidentally, controls the Strait of Hormuz through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil and gas passes.

But this process of political, territorial, and energy neo-colonisation is not confined solely to the US’s historical enemies; Europe is also in its crosshairs. As the NSS argues that the “US objective must be to help Europe correct its current course” through “patriotic parties” – now veritable Trojan horses of this neo-imperialism within the EU – we are witnessing, live and in plain sight, external interference in European internal affairs. In the ideological vision of the reactionary international, the European Union project is superfluous. Despite the EU’s contradictions and double standards in international conflicts, the reactionary right has no need for its founding values based on international law, multilateralism, cooperation and continental solidarity. And, aligning their interests with those of fossil fuel capital, they have no need for the EU’s commitment to the energy transition.

Inevitably, the energy transition clashes with fossil fuel imperialism. Beyond calling into question the enormous profits of the fossil fuel sector, it also reshuffles the geopolitical deck. Whilst the US, Russia and the Gulf states base much of their power on their position as the world’s leading oil producers, the EU – but above all China, the new great power of green capitalism – has accelerated the shift towards renewables. In this new “ecological Cold War”, the marked differences are becoming increasingly acute between the old petro-states that do not want to die and the aspiring electro-states that have not yet been born.

In this sense, those who commit to the energy transition are, in effect, committing to reducing their dependence on fossil-fuel capitalism – whether corporate or state-led – and to strengthening their sovereignty in all its dimensions in the face of imperialism, whether Trumpist or Putinist.² For Europe, therefore, in addition to all the ethical and climate-related reasons inherited from the Paris Agreement, which are as relevant today as they were in 2015, the ecological transition can also be viewed politically as a powerful tool of sovereignty against fossil fuel vassalage. Turning Europe into an electro-continent and its member states into electro-states is one of the central pillars of global geopolitics in the coming years.

For Europe, the ecological transition can also be viewed politically as a powerful tool of sovereignty against fossil fuel vassalage.

Eco-socialism in the new world (dis)order

Looking ahead, we are witnessing a profound shift in the underlying logic of the just transition. Since the Paris Agreement, this was the executive arm of “climate cultural hegemony”, driven above all by ethical and solidarity-based motives of caring for the planet, future generations, or the Pacific islands. Today, however, the energy transition is taking place mainly in Europe for geopolitical reasons of national and continental sovereignty. Through the electrification of everything everywhere – the still-emerging “electric hegemony” – the energy transition is being reframed within an “independence versus empire” context. Without abandoning the progress of the previous decade, this new landscape compels all actors to rethink their vision, strategies, and alliances.

Yet there is a trap that we must avoid. It is true that climate action is no longer an end in itself, but rather a possible consequence of the quest for sovereignty, yet this does not detract in the slightest from the climate emergency. The environmental reasons for a transition remain as relevant as ever, if not more so, in the face of the serious and ongoing global warming that is causing ever-increasing social, economic, labour, and environmental devastation. Downplaying it, prioritising competitiveness over sustainability, deregulating and dismantling the European Green Deal under pressure from certain economic sectors, or treating issues of sovereignty and climate in a non-complementary manner would be grave errors and own goals.³

Today, the energy transition is doubly urgent. Added to the climate emergency is the urgency of building sovereignty through the transition. The latter does not replace the former; both are equally relevant and are two sides of the same coin. Any backtracking on climate policy represents a short-term gain for competitiveness and a long-term loss for sovereignty and resilience.

Furthermore, given that we face both climate and geopolitical emergencies there is a need for Europe, to push towards the energy transition swiftly and at a large scale. Whilst they remain important, the time has passed for confining ourselves to think tanks and the “small is beautiful” ethos of the 1970s. Fighting the tide of climate denial and – as wars in Ukraine and Iran drive up the price of the fossil fuels on which we still so heavily depend – speeding up the energy transition requires greater political, industrial, and social impetus. This should come through major public and private investment, reducing energy demand, and rapidly transforming mass consumption to make it renewable and sustainable. As activist and reporter Gorka Laurnaga suggests, “If climate change [and, I would add, geopolitics] is a macro-problem, it cannot be solved with micro-responses.”

To this end, it is essential to overcome the contradictions of the energy transition at a local level, where alliances between a romanticised view of the countryside and agriculture, nimbyism, doomsday thinking, and climate denialism are hindering the renewable energy projects needed for these new times. There is no room for leniency towards unscrupulous multinationals or local corruption, and participatory and environmental safeguards should be vehemently upheld. Such an effort should include committing to socio-economic and employment benefits for affected communities, so that no land is sacrificed and the transition is fair. Although it is good to strive for aesthetic and cultural harmony, and the large-scale and massive is not necessarily beautiful, large projects like these will save lives in the face of the major climate and geopolitical challenges of today and the coming decades.

However, for the energy transition to take place, essential raw materials are also needed. Whether we are talking about lithium, cobalt, or rare earth minerals,⁴ all these materials are used in batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, or heat pumps and are essential for Europe’s electrification and decarbonisation. However, 10 out of 26 critical raw materials are entirely imported from outside the EU, and none of the rare earths used in the EU are processed internally. In other words, the bloc is highly dependent on third countries – especially China – for access to or the processing of critical raw materials essential to its energy transition. Without strategic resources directly exploited and controlled throughout the entire value chain by the EU, strategic autonomy is an empty slogan and the energy transition as a vehicle for sovereignty is a pipe dream.

In addition to a structural and long-term reorientation of production and consumption in post-growth terms as well as a firm industrial commitment to the recycling of raw materials, this also entails an inevitable relocation of extraction to European territory. On the road towards decarbonisation, we cannot expect to maintain high levels of welfare and public services and bring about a successful ecological transition unless we relocate closer to home some of the negative impacts of our way of life. These impacts are currently outsourced to countries with lighter social, labour and environmental protections. There can be no sovereignty without a minimum level of extraction on European soil. What matters is that this is done in accordance with democratic rules, strict limits, social, climate, and biodiversity protections, and humane labour conditions. It must also bring benefits for the local populations involved.

Today, the energy transition is doubly urgent. Added to the climate emergency is the urgency of building sovereignty through the transition.

Sovereignty through alliance

At the same time, sovereignty is never absolute. Even though globalisation is undergoing severe turbulence, there are and will continue to be many economic, social, and ecological interdependencies in the coming decades in a highly interconnected world. To avoid falling into energy vassalage under the US, Russia, or the Gulf states, Europe must commit to further diversifying its strategic alliances. As spheres of influence return, diversification should involve the staunch defence of multilateralism and the ability to strike agreements of various kinds with different countries, with a central focus on energy and raw materials.

When production or recycling is not possible in Europe, the EU should never be reliant on a single source. Let Russian gas or the political unreliability of the United States serve as a lesson. One condition should always be clear: bilateral agreements should be built under the umbrella of the Paris Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the International Labour Organization, and the 2030 Agenda, and necessitate the same labour and environmental standards in the country of production as in Europe.

Beyond that, we need to reflect deeply on our complex relationship with China. The Asian giant, which controls much of the rare earths needed for renewable energy, has become a driving force behind the green transition. The rapid electrification of its economy and industry potentially puts it on a path to becoming an “electro-state”. It is a central player in the ecological transition and an indispensable partner in countering the fossil fuel empire. Like it or not, at climate summits and beyond, the global climate coalition must go through China. At the same time, as well as being a deeply authoritarian and repressive state, China is a fierce competitor with the capacity to undermine large parts of Europe’s ecological transition by flooding the markets with its overproduction. This applied a decade ago with solar panels, and it applies now with electric cars or batteries.

Ultimately, with China, the aim is to strike a dynamic balance between a firm defence of European economic sovereignty – our “Made inEurope” green transition – and our democratic values, whilst at the same time opening up and strengthening channels of geopolitical and commercial collaboration to support and drive the global fight against climate change.

Without strategic resources directly exploited and controlled by the EU, strategic autonomy is an empty slogan and the energy transition as a vehicle for sovereignty is a pipe dream.

But the question of alliances also arises at a domestic level. Considering the green transition not merely as an ethical-climate issue but also as a matter of geopolitics and sovereignty can help us broaden the range of political alliances to achieve it. Alongside the usual progressive and environmentalist partners (parties, trade unions, NGOs, businesses, etc.), there are liberal currents with a strong pro-European and supranationalist ideology, as well as other conservative and patriotic currents, with a strong emphasis on the state and fierce protection of their homeland. In fact, the prospect of colonisation and external interference represents a serious ideological rift for some European nationalist-denialist currents, turning their worldview into a “confused patriotism”. By vehemently opposing the Green New Dealand, in doing so, defending the fossil fuel empire politically and economically, they create a profound internal contradiction: one can hardly defend one’s homeland whilst simultaneously selling it to foreign powers and becoming mere vassals to them. Whilst we clearly need to put our finger on the nationalist-denialist sore spot, it is time to strengthen traditional alliances centred on the ethical-climate axis and forge more uncomfortable ones, this time centred on the energy sovereignty axis.

This is not the time to remain self-absorbed. Beyond defending what has been achieved over the last decade, we must now adapt to the new context and strategically reposition ourselves to regain the initiative. For the sake of sustainability and sovereignty, the just transition can and must win the cultural and political battle against the fossil fuel empire.

This article was originally published in Spanish in the magazine Gaceta Sindical. Reflexión y Debate (CCOO), Issue 42, May 2026. It is republished here with permission.

Translated by Albie Mills |Voxeurop

1. For example, in 2025, the European People’s Party broke through the cordon sanitaire surrounding the environmental sustainability of large corporations in the European Parliament for the first time. See: https://elpais.com/internacional/2025-11-23/el-acercamiento-de-la-derecha-a-los-ultras-tensa-la-cuerda-en-bruselas.html ︎
2. The similarities between Putin and Trump, beyond the political currents they represent, are becoming increasingly evident. Ideologically, they are defenders of “traditional values”, rooted in a Christian and white world that must be saved from decline, with an obsession against the LGBT community and feminism, whilst in political practice they systematically employ lies and contempt for liberal and parliamentary democracy. ︎
3. Let us not confuse simplification with deregulation. Whilst it is always possible to improve administrative efficiency by simplifying processes and laws (for example, for SMEs), this is not the same as deregulation, the aim of which is to weaken legal safeguards, almost always in favour of big business. ︎
4. These 17 chemical elements are in fact metal oxides that are insoluble in water; in the 18th century, the term “earth” was used to refer to oxides. Many are not in fact “rare” elements (they may even be more abundant than lead or copper) but are classified as “rare” because it is very uncommon to find them in a pure form. ︎

Environmental fallout is becoming a tangible reality for a growing number of Europeans amidst unabated climate change. While much of this harm is hard to attribute to a single cause or set of policies, there are cases where a few actors bear clear responsibility for the damage. This dynamic is visible in the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, where voters have expressed their frustration through the ballot box.

The ground in the Dutch province of Groningen shakes more often than one might expect. More than 1,600 kilometres from the nearest active volcano, and far from any major natural fault lines, the earthquakes that trouble this region are entirely man-made.

For decades, the Netherlands extracted vast quantities of natural gas from beneath Groningen’s soil, powering homes, fuelling industry, and filling state coffers, all while quietly destabilising the earth below. What began as an economic triumph has since left a complicated legacy: thousands of small earthquakes have damaged homes, unsettled communities, and eroded public trust. Today, residents live not only with cracks in their walls, but with fractures in their confidence in the institutions that once championed the project. From compensation claims and legal battles to the ballot box, this distrust is increasingly visible today.

Gas in Groningen

Up until 1959, the North Sea area was assumed to be mostly devoid of oil and natural gas. This changed when exploratory drilling by the Dutch Petroleum Company (NAM), jointly owned by Shell and Esso, discovered a gas field in the municipality of Slochteren, in the province of Groningen. While little was known about its size at first, further drilling revealed a site large enough to be of commercial interest. After the Dutch government granted a concession in 1963, extraction began under a consortium of the state-owned mining company, NAM, Esso, and Shell.

The ensuing gas rush was further amplified by expectations that gas would lose its relevance over the following decades with the anticipated rise of nuclear energy. Consequently, there was a strong push to scale up production and sell Groningen’s gas quickly, and early concerns – particularly about possible ground subsidence – were brushed aside. Extraction ultimately peaked in 1976, at 88 billion cubic metres, roughly equivalent to Germany’s entire current annual gas consumption. Only after the oil crisis of the 1970s and growing social resistance to nuclear energy had shown that gas was here to stay did the government begin treating the Groningen field as more of a long-term reserve, slightly reducing extraction and diversifying towards smaller fields, particularly in the North Sea.

A Turning point

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the Groningen field seemed nothing short of a miracle. Gas profits flowed generously into shareholders’ pockets as well as into the treasury. The Dutch government received up to 85 per cent of gas revenues, which at times accounted for as much as a fifth of total government spending. For a small country still rebuilding after World War II, this was transformative. Roads, schools, hospitals, and social programmes were funded in no small part by the resource extracted from beneath Groningen.

Yet the benefits to the province itself proved limited. The gas sector created around 9,200 jobs – meaningful but modest for a region with a labour force of approximately 286,000. As a Dutch parliamentary inquiry concluded in 2023, only about 1 per cent of the total revenues from the gas field flowed back to Groningen. Most of the economic value flowed upwards to The Hague, to be redistributed at the national level, far from the villages that hosted the extraction sites.

National policy choices only deepened this imbalance. Unlike Norway, which established a sovereign wealth fund on its oil revenues, the Netherlands folded gas income directly into the state budget. This allowed for the rapid expansion of the Dutch welfare state, but at the cost of longer-term planning. The gas windfall also brought what The Economist would coin the “Dutch Disease” in 1977: as revenues strengthened the guilder, Dutch manufacturing lost its international competitiveness, and unemployment more than quadrupled between 1970 and 1977, rising from 1.1 to 5.1 per cent. In short, the gas boom filled the treasury while hollowing out industry.

Things get shaky

For the first two decades of gas extraction, the ground beneath Groningen remained deceptively calm. Despite early concerns about subsidence, no seismic activity was officially recorded, reinforcing the belief that the risks were manageable. This confidence began to erode on Christmas Day in 1986, when a magnitude-2.8 earthquake struck near Assen. In 1991, the Dutch meteorological institute recorded the first officially recognised induced earthquake directly linked to the Groningen field, with a magnitude of 2.4. From there, seismic activity accelerated: four earthquakes in 1991, six in 1992, and 16 in 1993.

Induced earthquakes occur when human activity, most commonly hydrocarbon extraction, alters pressure levels in underground rock formations. As gas is removed, pressure drops, the surrounding rock compacts, and stress builds along geological faults until it finds sudden release. In Groningen, this process unfolded gradually but relentlessly.

By the early 2010s, the situation had escalated sharply. In 2013 alone, 133 earthquakes were confirmed across the Netherlands, 121 of them in Groningen, averaging roughly one every three days. The turning point came on 16 August 2012, with the Huizinge earthquake, measuring 3.6 on the Richter scale, the strongest ever recorded above the Groningen field.

Though most of these tremors were classified as light by seismological standards, their impact on buildings and residents was anything but negligible. Homes cracked, foundations shifted, and entire neighbourhoods began to deteriorate.

Still, the political response lagged despite the mounting evidence. In January 2013, the Minister of Economic Affairs, Henk Kamp, decided against an immediate reduction in gas extraction, against the urgent recommendation by the State Supervision of Mines, instead commissioning 14 separate investigations into the maximum credible earthquake magnitude, seismic hazard, effects on housing and infrastructure, security of supply, and the fiscal cost of a production cut. This decision came at a time when the Netherlands was in a period of fiscal austerity, and gas revenues were not easy to forgo.

The prevailing assumption was that the risks could be managed financially. A compensation scheme for earthquake damage was expanded, based on the belief that revenues could offset material losses and political fallout. Extraction would continue; damages would be paid.

It was not until 2014 that production was capped – at 42.5 billion cubic metres – for the first time explicitly due to the earthquakes. Further reductions followed, though always cautiously. Plans to phase out extraction entirely were announced, revised, and at one point delayed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which briefly revived Groningen’s strategic importance. Gas extraction from the field ultimately ceased in October 2023. By then, roughly 2.3 trillion cubic metres of gas had been extracted from one of the largest gas fields ever exploited.

But even with extraction halted, the harm persists. Over 3,300 buildings were demolished in Groningen due to earthquake damage between 2012 and 2023. Furthermore, following the Huizinge quake, hundreds of thousands of damage reports have been filed. The Dutch state has paid over 1.2 billion euros in compensation, yet many residents describe the process as slow, opaque, and adversarial. Studies by researchers at the University of Groningen also link sustained exposure to the risk of earthquakes to deteriorating mental and physical health outcomes, and even to increased mortality. Entire communities lived for years in a state of permanent vigilance, unsure whether their homes were safe or whether promised repairs would ever materialise.

Shaking up the vote

What makes Groningen particularly distinctive is not just the scale of the damage, but its origin. The harm that people there have faced for decades is immediate, local, and unmistakably man-made. And that has had significant political consequences.

Jordan McAllister and Afiq bin Oslan tackle this topic in a recent paper titled “Shaking up the Vote: The Electoral Impact of Induced Earthquakes”. Placing the Groningen earthquakes at the centre of a broader inquiry, the authors examine how first-hand experience of the direct consequences of environmental harm has translated into changed voting behaviour.

Groningen is an unusually well-suited setting for this kind of study. Unlike pollution or an oil spill, where the distribution of harm is ultimately shaped by human decisions, induced earthquakes strike in nearby areas depending on geological factors that no one controls. They are caused by human activity (unambiguously so in Groningen, where earthquakes were virtually non-existent before drilling began), but where exactly they strike is essentially random. As a result, the researchers can reasonably associate differences in voting behaviour across polling stations with earthquake exposure rather than some pre-existing political difference between areas.

Using data on 891 earthquakes linked to the Groningen field alongside highly granular polling-station-level data across Groningen and its two neighbouring provinces, Friesland and Drenthe, McAllister and bin Oslan ask whether voter exposure to induced earthquakes increases electoral support for GroenLinks, the Dutch Green party. The answer, in short, is yes. Across three elections and multiple model specifications, areas with greater earthquake exposure consistently show higher GroenLinks vote shares in subsequent elections.

Environmental shocks then do not automatically and uniformly push electorates in a greener direction. How exposed they are, and what else that exposure demands of them, matter as well.

The paper also finds that earthquakes are associated with a significant fall in support for the PvdA, the Dutch Labour party, consistent with the idea that earthquake exposure is prompting vote-switching towards the Greens from other parties on the left, rather than simply raising overall turnout.

Crucially, the relationship between earthquake exposure and green voting is not linear. It peaks at moderate levels of exposure and weakens at the very highest levels of impact. The authors suggest that those most severely affected may come to prioritise immediate material concerns such as compensation, repairs, and economic security over electoral environmental preferences. At the same time, those experiencing meaningful but less overwhelming exposure are most likely to translate that experience into a green vote. Environmental shocks then do not automatically and uniformly push electorates in a greener direction. How exposed they are, and what else that exposure demands of them, matter as well.

Beyond Groningen

The Groningen case is, in several respects, unusual. Induced seismicity directly linked to gas extraction in a densely populated region, with clear institutional responsibility and a single identifiable operator, is not a combination that recurs frequently elsewhere. But the broader mechanism it illustrates – locally experienced and clearly attributable environmental harm feeding back into political behaviour – is hardly confined to the Netherlands.

In the Val d’Agri valley in the southern Italian region of Basilicata, the energy giant ENI’s oil extraction operations present a comparable picture. The region hosts the largest onshore oil field in Western Europe, yet its population has seen negligible economic benefit from decades of extraction while bearing environmental costs, including contaminated water sources and elevated rates of cancer and respiratory illness.

The political response has been real: ENI executives have faced joint legal action from the regional government, municipalities, and environmental agencies. Moreover, grassroots organisations such as COVA Contro have built sustained platforms for accountability. Anti-extraction sentiment has surfaced electorally too: in the 2019 regional election, a left-wing candidate running explicitly on an anti-oil platform received 4.3 per cent of the vote, though this has remained a niche position rather than a decisive force.

Two factors may help explain the gap between Italy and the Netherlands. Firstly, economic anxiety in the Val d’Agri valley, one of Italy’s poorest regions, tends to compete with environmental grievance as a political driver. Secondly, unlike the Netherlands, Italy has no well-established Green party capable of channelling anti-extraction sentiment into parliamentary weight. While the Groningen parallel seems to hold in terms of the underlying injury and political mobilisation, the similarities are less clear when it comes to votes.

The harm is real enough, but the causal pathway remains tangled, and the harm harder to isolate.

The German lignite regions offer another striking parallel. In the Rhineland and Lausitz, local communities have borne the costs of extraction in ways that are, if anything, more visible than in Groningen: more than 50 villages or parts of villages have been demolished in North Rhine-Westphalia alone to make way for expanding open-cast mines, with entire communities uprooted and resettled. The public has opposed these projects fiercely: the planned demolition of the village of Lützerath to expand RWE’s Garzweiler II mine drew thousands of protesters over years of sustained resistance; in 2023 the eventual five-day police clearance of an activist occupation of the village became a national flashpoint. But was there also a wider political response?

The vote share data from North Rhine-Westphalia is at least suggestive: the Greens rose from 6.4 per cent to 18.2 per cent in state elections between 2017 and 2022, in contrast to their more modest gains at the federal level, from 8.9 per cent in 2017 to 14.8 per cent in the 2021 Bundestag election. That rise, though, predates the party’s own turn: In October 2022, when they were in government federally and in the state, the Greens agreed to the deal with RWE that cleared Lützerath for demolition. This turn was viewed by many as a change in sides. Whether this will cost them electorally is difficult to determine.

The confounders here are too numerous to read much into either shift directly, but the broader point stands: these cases offer at least plausible instances of locally experienced environmental harm feeding back into political behaviour, in different institutional and partisan contexts. What they also reveal, by contrast, is why Groningen is such a rare analytical opportunity. Elsewhere, the harm is real enough, but the causal pathway remains tangled, and the harm harder to isolate.

The limits of attribution

The cases considered so far share a key feature: the source of harm is local, visible, and traceable to a specific operator or set of decisions. Where the previous section showed variation – Groningen producing a measurable electoral response, Basilicata and the lignite regions less so – the explanation lay not in attribution, but in what came after it: whether a credible electoral channel existed to convert grievance into votes. The mobilisation, in all three cases, seems real enough. But not all environmental harms afford even that starting point.

When flooding devastates a region or drought destroys harvests, the causal chain is longer and more contested. Climate change may have made the event more severe, but the link between many natural disasters and specific policy choices is harder to draw, and therefore harder to convert into electoral accountability. The devastating floods that struck Valencia in October 2024, killing over 230 people in one of the deadliest natural disasters in Spain’s recent history, illustrate this well. Scientists broadly agreed that climate change had intensified the rainfall, but the political response was far from unified. Multiple levels of government faced – and traded – blame simultaneously: regional president Carlos Mazón faced mass protests over the dismantling of an emergency unit his administration had shut down just the year before, while the national government faced accusations of insufficient coordination. Rather than producing more support for environmental protection, the debate became highly polarised, with disinformation campaigns seeking to redirect blame onto environmentalists themselves for having allegedly restricted flood-control infrastructure.

Groningen and the cases it can usefully be set alongside illustrate that the political salience of environmental harm is shaped not only by its severity, but by its legibility, by how clearly it can be traced to identifiable decisions, and how directly it is felt. As the consequences of both energy policy and climate change continue to accumulate across Europe, that kind of clarity is likely to become rarer.