After Europe’s summer heatwaves, climate salience is at its highest in years, yet it’s clear the past frameworks used to mobilise majorities are crumbling amid an ongoing cost of living crisis and energy insecurity. To penetrate politically, climate communications must fit within the material realities of voters’ lives. In other words, the key to mobilising climate action is to demonstrate that the green transition can make European countries more secure and people’s lives cheaper.

The salience of climate change has been on a downward trajectory post-2019. That year is remembered by many as the moment climate politics broke containment: Ursula von der Leyen’s newly elected European Commission mandated Net Zero by 2050 after mass mobilisations in the streets demanding climate action and a strong performance by Green parties in that year’s European elections.

The years that followed could not have been more different. Pandemic lockdowns broke the wave of climate protests, and the subsequent cost-of-living crisis forced climate down the political agenda. There, the issue languished, rarely emphasised by mainstream parties except occasionally by far-right agitators attempting to stir up “greenlash”. 

Even before the cost of living crisis, climate struggled to get more than 10 per cent of European electorates ranking it among their top issues. While polling shows that people hold ambient concern for the climate crisis, it remained a second-order issue. The movement has thus existed in political purgatory: marked by high awareness and intense polarisation, yet devoid of broader electoral momentum.

The recent summer of extreme weather may have broken that impasse. New research we conducted in August at Mandate Research, a strategy consulting firm for political campaigns, shows a definite spike in voters’ climate concern during this summer’s heatwaves. Among the countries we polled,¹ this effect was particularly visible in Hungary and across Southern Europe, where Spain and France in particular were hit by devastating wildfires. In Hungary, 91 per cent of voters report being worried about climate change, followed closely by Italy (81 per cent), France (80 per cent), and Spain (68 per cent).

This worry translated directly into issue salience. In Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and the UK, roughly a fifth of voters now rank the environment and climate change among their top two issues. In Hungary, salience catapulted from a spring baseline of 3 per cent to a staggering 25 per cent, making it the second most important issue in the country in August. Hungarian citizens have had a particularly shocking confrontation with energy precarity this summer. The most severe drought in over a century partially dried up the Danube, causing a temporary shutdown of the nuclear facility supplying nearly half the country’s power.

Salience numbers are famously difficult to budge. The belief that climate politics had hit a saturation point, with returns diminishing as voters grew accustomed to extreme weather rather than increasing with the severity of the climate crisis, had convinced many mainstream parties that the issue was a vote loser. However, double-digit salience increases in the span of a few months demonstrate that European voters are not yet numb to peril.

This momentum is unlikely to fully evaporate in the colder months. With El Niño intensifying towards historic peaks and European gas storage levels concerningly low ahead of the winter season, the climate conversation is poised to shift from record heatwaves to heating bills and the threat of more extreme weather events.

The failure of old stories

Reclaiming a seat at the table is good news, but squandering this moment with outdated messaging would be fatal.

While rising salience presents an undeniable political opening, progressives must not misread the room. Affordability, immigration, housing, and healthcare still rank above climate in most of the countries we surveyed, and overall concern has met but not surpassed the 2019 peak.
More importantly, the world has changed significantly since then, and so have the ways people relate to the climate crisis. The failures of green policies, the rise of the far right (with its own narratives and solutions to the climate emergency) and the shifting geopolitical landscape all demand a different approach from progressives. Reclaiming a seat at the table is good news, but squandering this moment with outdated messaging would be fatal.

This risk is most visible with “Net Zero”, a 2050 target enshrined in both the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal. When asked to rank environmental policy goals from highest to lowest priority, “achieving Net Zero emissions” ranked dead last across every single country surveyed. In Germany (-37), the UK (-42), France (-35), and the US (-40), Net Zero received deeply negative net priority ratings. Voters overwhelmingly prefer tangible, immediate objectives: building clean energy, protecting nature and wildlife, and reducing energy costs.

Furthermore, the public is deeply sceptical about the feasibility of Net Zero targets. Well over half of respondents believe it is unlikely their country will make meaningful progress towards the 2050 goal. The attempt to bundle various policy aims together and rebrand it as Net Zero has clearly failed to reach voters; repetition has led to abstraction and meaninglessness.

Even more troubling is the perceived distribution of economic costs. Almost half of Europeans surveyed believe that pro-environmental policies have left ordinary people in their country worse off, including 54 per cent in the Netherlands, 46 per cent in Spain, 45 per cent in Germany, 45 per cent in France, and 42 per cent in the UK.

This perception persists despite measurable, real-world improvements in air quality, public health indicators, and biodiversity conservation across Europe. Policies that treated emissions reductions as the target and affordability as an afterthought have clearly reached their limit, and they are even less likely to succeed amid a prolonged cost of living crisis.  Relentless far-right framing that depicts environmentalism as technocracy has also played its part in convincing people that green policy is synonymous with meaningless sacrifice and elite control.

Today, progressives have to contend with thin, transactional support for climate action. When asked if they would support renewable energy, people respond positively. However, when renewable investment is posited as requiring taxation or public service cuts, this support turns sharply negative across nearly all European countries.

Moralistic, future-focused arguments and lofty green targets celebrated in the Fridays for Future past have lost momentum. The timelines environmental policies require are inescapable, but so is the need to have people on board a green project. Voters want a green future, but they want a job and food on the table for their families an order of magnitude more.

Reconfiguring climate politics

While affordability concerns overshadow melting ice caps, they also provide an opportunity for the climate movement to execute a strategic pivot. The convergence of climate extremes, geopolitical volatility, and rising utility bills creates a narrow window to reframe clean energy as a practical, necessary alternative to fossil fuels. Low riverbeds impact the cost of transportation, hot summers make it hard to cool power plants, and a warming atmosphere yields bad harvests and increases the price of everyday goods such as olive oil, coffee, and chocolate. Framed this way, the green transition is less a matter of global leadership and blue-sky thinking than a shield against further economic insecurity.

Voters do make the connection between renewable power and structural affordability. Clear majorities across Europe agree that transitioning to renewable energy will lower energy bills and reduce dependence on volatile fossil fuel markets. In a similar vein, expanding renewable capacity is consistently ranked by voters as the single most effective action governments can take to lower energy costs.

This is reflected in message testing across Europe. Narratives focused on immediate material outcomes, such as capping household energy bills by taxing fossil fuel windfall profits, or protecting national energy security from foreign autocrats, consistently outperform abstract moral appeals.

Right-wing figures like Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Kemi Badenoch in the UK have attempted to present themselves as pragmatic leaders defending working families against “arbitrary climate targets”. Support for nuclear energy as part of the solution is often featured in this kind of discourse – and it resonates among voters, ranking as the top climate priority in Sweden and Poland, and a close second in the UK, France, and the Netherlands.

During this summer’s heatwaves, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen also tried to pitch herself as a pragmatic leader by advocating a “grand plan” for air conditioning. While this will neither solve the climate crisis nor adapt our cities to the heat, it put her opponents on the defensive.

All this shows that progressives can no longer lay exclusive claim to the climate issue. The newfound salience of the climate crisis will only translate into votes if they offer solutions to people’s material concerns. In this context, conceding the language of pragmatism to the Right would be a strategic mistake.

Voters want a green future, but they want a job and food on the table for their families an order of magnitude more.

Rebuilding majorities

Europeans have not abandoned the green transition. Across the continent, solid majorities recognise that drastic change is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and they believe that green investment can help make their lives easier.

However, voters are no longer responding to the argument as it has been framed and delivered over the past decade, and hoping that extreme weather will shock electorates back to reason is bad politics. Many Europeans are providing the movement an opening because of the energy and cost of living crisis and security concerns. The climate movement must take heed of this, and meet voters where they are.

Civil society and climate movements can continue to highlight immediate threats from extreme weather to maintain emotional urgency – after all, this type of messaging still proves the most effective in boosting the salience of the climate crisis. But political parties competing for government must ground their vision in tangible economic benefits. By dismantling the abstract vocabulary of Net Zero, confronting corporate profiteering, and presenting renewable energy as a tool for bill reduction and sovereign security, progressives can begin to rebuild a majority for climate action.

1. Sweden, The Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Hungary, Poland, and the US. ︎

Beyond rogue scenarios and hype, the AI boom is accelerating a deeper structural shift: the migration of the global economy to the cloud. So far, the EU has mostly tried to rein in Big Tech through regulation, but this reactive approach has fallen short. The recent push for tech sovereignty can only succeed if it starts with democratic choice and a shared vision for social and technological progress.

Alessio Giussani: Your book The Rulers is primarily about three companies: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. What sets them apart from other big corporations?

Cecilia Rikap: In the current debate, there’s a lot of noise about what’s going on with AI. Everybody, of course, has the right to talk about AI, particularly because decisions are made behind closed doors, and we lack a space to democratically discuss the ways forward. But instead of talking about the roots of corporate power and how it dictates technological change and profits from it, the conversation is often about two types of agents – and I’m playing with the word “agent” here.

One is the AI agent. People marvel at the things that AI can do, and instead of trying to understand who is developing this technology and for what purposes, they get caught up in this rhetoric that AI is either wonderful or horrible, but is extremely powerful either way. Others, who are more concerned with economic inequalities – as I also am – focus on another type of agent: the CEOs and the founders of these companies, particularly the ones who side with the far right, like Elon Musk or Alex Karp. I’m not saying that this approach is not relevant. But if we truly want to understand the roots of corporate power today, and therefore act upon it, dismantle it, and create alternatives, we cannot miss the forest for the tree.

These far-right characters shout very loudly and sometimes distract us from what’s really going on; this is what happens often with someone like Elon Musk. I’m not saying his companies don’t matter or that we shouldn’t study them, but in my research I don’t want to single out companies arbitrarily. Instead, I try to offer a more comprehensive view of corporate power. Therefore, I start by analysing the largest companies by market capitalisation, and then try to understand what explains their power.

I identify two groups: one is the group of big oil companies, and more broadly, companies that get their advantage by systematically extracting and monetising nature in different forms. The other group, which is the largest one and has been growing fast and overtaking some of the old giants, is made up of companies whose advantage comes from systematically capturing intangibles.

Corporate power has always been built, to some degree at least, on capturing and making sense of intangibles like information and knowledge, organising them, and putting them at the service of production processes. Think, for example, of the R&D laboratory of IBM, or the marketing department of Coca-Cola. These companies have been intellectual monopolies for decades, capturing intangibles like science and knowledge (in the case of IBM) or narratives and brand-building (Coca-Cola).

As intellectual monopolies, they mobilise their intangible assets to exercise economic power. Start-ups, for example, control intangibles, but usually they are not used for capturing economic value. An intellectual monopoly puts different forms of knowledge, narratives, and data at the service of expanding its control of the economy. This control can take the form of a chokepoint if it occurs on a specific market, or of a panopticon if it gives the ability to monitor all information created and exchanged within a network, enabling the leading corporation to plan, organise, and control beyond ownership.

Based on your analysis, a company like NVIDIA – which designs the most advanced AI chips and is the largest in the world by market capitalisation – does not qualify as a “ruler”. Why?

Nvidia has a clear chokepoint because it controls a specific market and is certainly an intellectual monopoly. But beyond that, it doesn’t have the capacity to control a broad part of the global economy. Its power is focused on semiconductor design, whereas other companies have a panopticon view, often because they sell directly across multiple markets. When you are at the supermarket, you think there are so many brands, but then you start turning the packaging, and you see Unilever everywhere. This gives a company like Unilever a panopticon: broad oversight across different parts of the economy. So all these companies mobilise intangibles to control portions of our lives, but these end up being contained, limited. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the only ones that combine multiple chokepoints and the largest panopticon of Western capitalism.

Many powerful actors are involved in producing an AI model. NVIDIA’s semiconductors are manufactured in Taiwan at TSMC, which I also classify as an intellectual monopoly with a chokepoint. So I’m not saying a company like Nvidia or TSMC isn’t powerful. But even the semiconductors from Nvidia end up entering the cloud of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Everywhere we look, we see these three companies controlling the many pieces and actors that then, seen together, become the digital stack.

Take academic research on AI, for example. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google co-produce around 90 per cent of their research with thousands of organisations. This isn’t exclusive to them: Meta, Nvidia, and companies from other sectors do it too. But when it comes to AI, Google and Microsoft are those with the largest capacity to control universities and public research organisations developing frontier research on AI. Moreover, they control the largest number of other companies, including start-ups, with their venture capital money and through the cloud.

Nvidia is expanding its profits so much that it has leverage to expand beyond its chokepoint. It is now trying to get its own cloud by investing a lot of money – also in partnership with other leading companies – to basically offer its semiconductors as a service on independent data centres that are not those of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Of course, this makes total sense because Nvidia doesn’t want to depend on selling to other big players. To some extent, what NVIDIA is trying to do is build its own cloud, and for me, this shows how important the cloud is.

What exactly is the cloud? And why does it bring so much power to the companies that control it?

Let me start with an example everyone knows: Netflix. It looks like a simple streaming app where we can watch whatever we want. Behind Netflix, there are thousands of digital services, which means that you have millions of lines of code that do a lot of different things. Not even a company as large as Netflix writes every line of code that makes the platform exist for all of us. Why? Because there are a lot of services, a lot of ready-made pieces of software for solving specific and repetitive issues that can be purchased. Where do you buy that? In the past, organisations used to go to a software provider and ask for software for their needs. It was more tailor-made, but it was also more expensive. Now, they rent it in the cloud.

The cloud is like a supermarket for digital technologies. It’s not just infrastructure offered as a service – that is, the data centres where data is stored and processed. You can get whatever you want in the cloud: software, a model, data, a platform, infrastructure, and more. From each of these clouds – which are run by Amazon, Microsoft and Google – you have thousands of options that you can purchase as a service.

That also means you never truly get access to the code. You don’t download the service to your computer, but you can use it while you are connected to the cloud. And this is where the cloud starts being something different. It’s not just the supermarket of technologies. It is also the production sphere, the factory, the place where data is arranged and organised, the software is produced, the architecture of the platforms is designed. Everything happens inside the cloud, and when we consume the services, we’re also inside the cloud. It’s as if I were also cooking and eating my meal inside the supermarket where I bought the ingredients. The production, the exchange, the consumption: it all happens there.

This differs from the power these companies already had over individuals through social media. Organisations of every size and every type, from small firms to large companies like Netflix, Nestlé, or Coca-Cola, and even governments, migrate to the cloud. In fact, the entire global economy is migrating to the cloud, which means that companies that control it get the capacity to oversee, predict, and anticipate where the economy is going; a level of foresight that no single institution, government, or organisation had in the past.

The cloud and intellectual monopolies predate the explosion of AI hype with the public release of ChatGPT in 2022. What does AI fundamentally change in the cloud’s role and the power relations it generates?

The AI companies that we now associate with the AI boom or hype, like OpenAI and Anthropic – but also DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014 – are tightly connected to the cloud giants in multiple ways, including venture capital money. Since the release of ChatGPT, these AI companies have required a growing amount of processing power, which has also driven the data centre boom. At the same time, we have organisations around the world that feel that they must adopt AI, that they cannot be left out. I call this AI FOMO. And what is the safest, and also the most seamless, way to adopt AI? Well, the cloud.

AI is like a Trojan horse, a marketing strategy for the cloud. It accelerates migration to the cloud. Through Amazon, Microsoft, or Google Cloud, you automatically integrate the AI models into all the rest of the digital services you use. And you might not trust Anthropic, but Microsoft? Microsoft has been there for many years, so these companies have built a reputation as trustworthy partners, especially for other leading firms. Some companies have contracts directly with OpenAI or with Anthropic, but more and more we see that organisations prefer to go to the supermarket, where today they might use Claude, tomorrow ChatGPT, and the day after tomorrow they may use China’s DeepSeek, because even DeepSeek is available as a service on the cloud of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Meanwhile, regulators and competition authorities focus on AI and whether the AI market will be competitive, or what to do to make it competitive. But AI exists within an ecosystem, and the ones that control the ecosystem beyond ownership are the cloud giants.

Controlling beyond ownership is also linked to planning and delivering innovation. How do you understand that concept?

We tend to think that innovation is a precondition for economic growth, and that growth, if we have the right policies, will lead to prosperity and a better life for everyone. Private companies are seen as the innovators, so governments are expected to cut red tape so we can achieve prosperity. Yet societies are not becoming more prosperous.

The classical understanding of innovation would define it as a new process or product put on the market. An invention might be the discovery of a new drug or treatment, but until it’s approved and sold on the market, it’s not an innovation. But this definition neglects that every innovation is produced collectively by many, and then monetised by the company that captures that co-created knowledge. Between 2012 and 2021, for example, Microsoft produced over 15,000 scientific publications. Almost all of them had at least one co-author who worked for another organisation, not Microsoft. During the same period, Microsoft was granted 35,000 patents. It shared ownership of just 1 per cent of those patents.

This goes to show that these corporations are not the only innovators. When companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and others work with public universities and research institutes or invest in startups, they do so to get access to the knowledge that is being produced, to steer the trajectory of that knowledge, and then recombine all the pieces of that huge puzzle and monetise all the new recombinations. In a way, they are the big appropriators. So we shouldn’t cope with them under the promise that their innovations will contribute to a better life. In fact, they don’t, and these are not just “their” innovations, but the product of collective creative processes involving many others. These companies are indeed producing a lot of frontier research on AI, but never alone.

Besides, innovation today should be understood as knowledge in all its forms. This includes narratives and data, and how all this gets combined in the melting pot of creativity that the intellectual monopolies control beyond ownership. Corporations craft narratives about what we think AI is and how it should be regulated, and push us to use AI as a method of inventing, sidelining other means of producing and creating. I call this process epistemic totalitarianism.

Europe seems to have only awakened to the dangers of this system since Trump’s return to the White House in 2024 and his unholy alliance with tech bros. But who’s really in charge? Who’s driving whom?

During the Cold War, the Department of Defence set the trajectory and orientation of technological change. The Pentagon did this by investing strategically as well as coordinating and planning the big technological innovations of the Cold War period. After the Cold War, there was a sense of, “Why should we continue doing this the same way? We won.” Of course, it doesn’t mean that the Pentagon stopped investing in technology in the 1990s and 2000s, but it was no longer steering and planning technological development in the same way. Now, big tech companies have increasingly become the big planners of science and technology, particularly of AI. The AI that we have is the AI that they want. It’s an AI that can be resold again and again to countless actors, making it cheaper to produce and expanding their control over our societies.

Europe has been missing this story for decades. It thought that the world was operating as a common market, and that we should promote competition because everyone was on the same page. Of course, Europe knew that China wasn’t on that page and that China was planning. But what was harder to see was that leading corporations, in particular those from the US, were also planning and controlling beyond ownership.

The US government, once it realised around a decade ago that this was going on, decided to take action, and the already solid relationship between big tech and the Department of Defence has grown stronger and stronger since then. The most important change in this dynamic is that big tech – unlike previous military subcontractors – does not depend on government money. A key difference between a company like Palantir and a company like Microsoft is that Microsoft doesn’t depend on funding from the US government and its allies to be profitable, whereas Palantir does. This doesn’t mean Palantir will always obey the White House rule and bend the knee, but it is in its best interest to keep the government happy. For big tech companies, it’s not about getting money from the government; it’s about getting political help. They need the US government to stop places like Europe from regulating them.

What do they want exactly? They seem to be asking to pull the brake on AI development, while promising that AI could bring immense benefits to humanity and pushing on the accelerator.

There are two prevalent discourses in Silicon Valley, which correspond to two different ways of trying to control the state. One is that democracy, innovation, and freedom cannot go together. It posits that innovation and freedom should be prioritised over democracy. For those pushing this view, the state has failed and needs to be destroyed; technology by itself will bring a better world and deliver progress in every respect – to those who can pay for it, of course. These are the views of people like Alex Karp, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel. But we also have the discourse of Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai, the CEOs of Microsoft and Google, who say almost every day that their technologies will deliver promised economic growth while helping governments manage public administration, schools, hospitals, and borders.

This second discourse is more subtle. I describe it as corporate diplomacy because it’s a more strategic way to convince governments – even progressive ones. And when it comes to regulations, of course, these companies will respond differently: they will pretend to be much more open to oversight, but the question is which type of regulation and who designs it. They say that the technology moves so fast that it’s impossible for government regulation to be updated as it should be, and so they push for self-regulation, or regulation done by a third-party actor that goes inside the company and works together with its employees, with the information that the company wants to share. And they agree on regulations that blame tech users but never (themselves as) producers.

So, even though it might seem like they’re saying something different, in the end, they are all pushing for a certain type of regulation that blinds governments and society more and creates a shield from external oversight.

Regulation has been the approach driving policymaking in Brussels for a long time. Now there has been a shift towards competitiveness and a new buzzword: tech sovereignty. You’ve been working with this concept well before it became so popular. What does it mean?

Tech sovereignty can mean three different things. It can mean techno-nationalism, which consists in giving all the contracts to European firms. However, European companies like Siemens or SAP are also intellectual monopolies. And they are private companies, so their interest is to make money, not to grant options, choices, and openness to our societies in terms of how technology is produced or for what purposes.

Another interpretation, prevalent today at the EU level, sees tech sovereignty as making things happen in Europe, and it is as problematic as the first, if not more. The European Commission’s Tech sovereignty package should be renamed the tech competitiveness package. It aims to achieve competitiveness and economic growth through or with the excuse of sovereignty. It’s good marketing to call it sovereignty, but it’s essentially about attracting more capital to Europe, growing GDP, and reducing the feeling that we are lagging behind vis-à-vis the US. As it is designed, the package allows a company like Microsoft to fulfil all the criteria [of Europeanness] if it stores data in European data centres, and if its subsidiaries selling its services are based in Europe. So, from a legal point of view, these companies will be European entities, even if they are part of the Microsoft multinational corporation.

Clearly, these two ways of thinking about sovereignty are very short-sighted. Sovereignty, when it comes to tech, should be connected to governance, democracy, and choice. It is about being able to decide which technologies we want, which ones we don’t want, and for what purposes. Who is going to develop them? To what extent are we going to develop them, given their ecological footprint? What data are we going to use? How will we recognise the collective work that goes into developing technology? How are we going to make sure the effects don’t harm workers?

Ultimately, sovereignty is about who decides. It’s about democratising the political power of who is deciding about the present and future of humanity, because these technologies are powerful and ubiquitous, and the technologies that we are getting today are decided behind closed doors by a few actors.

If you were a progressive politician, government, or policymaker who wants to work towards this more expansive notion of tech sovereignty, what kind of coalitions and constituencies would you try to involve in the process?

The “we” needs to include everyone who identifies that this is a problem and wants to build a vision of digital sovereignty that is about collectively co-creating and sharing knowledge.

I think we need to start by decoupling the public sector from these companies. We need to make sure the US government and the companies can’t switch off the states participating in building an alternative. We can start small, for example with education, which is a critical sector, because kids at school are receiving a Google Suite package and studying with generative AI. We’ve seen the effect it has even on adults: it reduces people’s capacity to think critically. We, as adults, have learned to maintain some balance, but kids often don’t have that capacity. Other critical sectors are healthcare and the public service media.

It’s hard, but it will not require all the money that the companies are investing because we are going to start smaller, from the capabilities that already exist. And Europe has a lot of those. A significant part of these companies’ advantage comes from research that was done and is still being done in Europe by European universities, European companies, and so on.

There’s a growing movement against data centres. Should they be part of the conversation? And can we really build a democratic and sovereign tech if we put a pause on them altogether?

Including the communities that are fighting against data centres is critical because if we are building a public alternative, we will need infrastructure. The question is, where are we going to build these data centres? To what extent do we need them?

There is the idea that hyperscale data centres are inevitable, but only because we’ve accepted the narrative from cloud giants and AI companies that what we need is the largest model with more parameters, even though that is less rigorous than the machine learning models developed to detect or do specific tasks. But of course, those models require more human effort and less energy. So, we also need to change the AI paradigm in this process.

Tech CEOs and politicians in the US mention China “catching up” day in and day out as the ultimate reason to push the accelerator and push back against meaningful regulation. Is that narrative justified by reality?

When you look at the level of investment in the digital infrastructure of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google compared to Alibaba, Tencent, or Huawei, you can clearly see that China is playing a different game. It is trying to expand the adoption of its models as much as possible, even if they are not at the frontier. If it had political interest in doing so, China could channel all its efforts into one big team producing the largest AI model you’ve ever seen, and it has the resources and people to do that. But that’s not the game that China is playing.

Nor is Beijing just playing the AI game. China has been focusing on so many industries; it’s trying to lead everywhere, while the US is focused on AI, and Europe is stuck in between because it’s not thinking about what Europeans’ problems are today. What’s the priority? What should we be focusing on?

I like to live in Europe. The quality of life here is way better than in the US, and we often forget this. We forget about all the things we still get in Europe that are much rarer in other parts of the world, and I think we need to embrace that much more. It’s the time to build digital commons. It’s the time to build global public goods. It’s time to solve critical problems instead of being blinded by the latest iteration of an AI model that clearly brings more problems than solutions. And again, I’m not saying we should solve all problems without technology, but we should first map the problems, who is being affected by them, and how, and then identify what type of solutions is needed. In some cases, it might be technology; in other cases, it might just be redistributing wealth and decision-making power. It’s ultimately about bold political choices, and I hope to see more of those coming from Europe.

The content of this interview has been edited and rearranged for length and clarity.

From California to France to the G20, “tax the billionaires” is shifting from slogan to concrete proposal. Beyond the revenue it would raise, it draws a sharp line between those who profit from crisis and everyone else. As the far right turns economic insecurity into a politics of scarcity and division, the billionaire enemy could become the foundation for a different political “we.” But only targeting a handful of people at the top risks leaving broader inequalities untouched.

This article is an 11-minute read. In the time it takes to finish reading it, the world’s most chronically online billionaire, Elon Musk, could add another 11 million dollars to his wealth – more than most people around the world will earn over their entire working lives – without having to do much of anything at all, other than, perhaps, angrily “tweet”.

And those millions add up fast. When SpaceX went public in June 2026, Musk became the first person Forbes had ever valued at more than one trillion – after his wealth had grown by more than 550 billion dollars over the previous year.

But Musk is not the only one. The US has Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg; Europe has its own billionaire class, from Bernard Arnault and his family in France to Amancio Ortega in Spain; China has Zhong Shanshan; and India has Mukesh Ambani. The list goes on, as do the zeros. By 2025, billionaire wealth reached a record 18.3 trillion dollars, increasing by more than 16 per cent in that year alone.

Beyond the numbers, what does any of this mean for our societies? For decades, there has been a rather convenient economic story about what happens when wealth grows at the top: it generates investment, jobs, and growth whose benefits eventually spread to everyone else, or “trickle down”. Yet wealth has become increasingly concentrated: the richest 10 per cent now own around three quarters of global wealth, while the poorest half own just 2 per cent.

The result is not simply inequality. At a certain point, the extraordinary concentration of resources in the hands of a very small number of people also becomes a concentration of power. Billionaires own or control major companies, media, and digital infrastructure; they finance political campaigns; some enter politics themselves. Others do not need to hold office for access. It has become common to see Elon Musk alongside presidents and heads of government, Mark Zuckerberg sitting down with political leaders, and some of the world’s wealthiest people moving through spaces of political power to which very few people have access. Nobody elected them to those rooms. Their invitation is, in large part, their wealth.

That concentration of wealth and power becomes particularly difficult to ignore when set against what everyone else has been asked to absorb. Austerity after the financial crash was followed by a pandemic and then a prolonged cost-of-living crisis. Eurofound’s 2025 survey found that 61 per cent of respondents in low-income EU households were struggling to make ends meet. Yet between 2020 and 2022 alone, billionaire wealth increased more than it had over 23 years between 1987 and 2010.

This divergence between those at the top and everyone else matters politically. When governments talk again about what societies can afford and what must be sacrificed, it becomes increasingly difficult to focus on what “ordinary people” must give up without also confronting what those who have accumulated the most should be expected to give back.

What even is wealth?

Which brings us back to Musk’s 11 million dollars, which is not a salary. Musk does not receive a million-dollar pay cheque every sixty seconds. Much of his wealth comes from his ownership of companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, whose increasing value allows his wealth to grow without anything resembling a conventional income. And that distinction matters enormously when it comes to taxation.

Work remains remarkably easy for states to see and tax. Billionaire wealth is a different creature. It can appreciate without being sold, sit inside companies and be reorganised through legal structures in ways that wages cannot. Someone can therefore become billions richer without reporting anything resembling those billions as taxable personal income.

Tt becomes increasingly difficult to focus on what ‘ordinary people’ must give up without also confronting what those who have accumulated the most should be expected to give back

The result is a peculiar political economy. Governments can tell an ordinary worker with extraordinary precision what she owes from her next euro of salary, while struggling to answer a seemingly simpler question about some of the richest people ever to have lived: what constitutes their fair share?

There is also a curious asymmetry in how we think about wealth. We are very accustomed to drawing poverty lines, minimum incomes, measures of deprivation. States have developed remarkably sophisticated ways of calculating exactly how little someone can have before they officially count as having too little. Far less attention has been devoted to drawing a line at the other end: can someone have too much?

That is beginning to change. For instance, political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns has made the case for limitarianism – the idea that there should be an upper limit to how much wealth an individual can hold. Others, like University of California, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, have focused on designing a wealth tax for the ultra-rich.

The idea has travelled well beyond academia. In 2024, under Brazil’s G20 presidency, Zucman was commissioned to develop a proposal for a coordinated minimum tax on the world’s billionaires, based on the principle that they should contribute at least 2 per cent of their wealth each year. And in California, home to many Silicon Valley billionaires, voters will decide this November on Proposition 40, which would impose a one-off 5 per cent tax on billionaire wealth to help fund healthcare.

These proposals differ substantially in their design, scale, and ambition. But taken together, they point towards a simple idea gathering political momentum: tax the billionaires.

Taxing the untaxable?

How exactly to do that remains contested – and the usual objections are never far behind. Wealth, we are told, can move across borders; billionaires can change their tax residence; some assets are difficult to value; assets tied up in companies are not necessarily available as cash; and sufficiently determined billionaires can employ sufficiently determined accountants to find ways around whatever rules governments create.

These are not imaginary problems. Several European countries have abandoned recurrent net wealth taxes over the past few decades amid concerns over avoidance, valuation, and administrative complexity. IMF economists have also questioned whether annual net wealth taxes are always the most effective instrument, arguing that stronger taxation of capital gains and inheritance may sometimes work better.

But these are, ultimately, problems of design. Tax systems already value assets, trace ownership, and deal with people and companies operating across borders. International information-sharing has made hiding financial wealth offshore more difficult, while international coordination – the entire logic behind Zucman’s G20 proposal – is precisely an attempt to prevent the world’s wealthiest people from playing one tax system against another.

None of this makes taxing billionaire wealth easy. But “difficult to tax” and “should not be taxed” are two quite different arguments.

Zucman estimates that, in proportion to their income, France’s approximately 100 billionaires currently pay half as much tax as the average French person. Correcting that imbalance, which is not unique to France, would improve the fiscal situation of cash-strapped governments. It could mean more resources for healthcare, housing, education, and public transport, or help meet the enormous investment required for the green transition. California’s Proposition 40 makes that connection particularly tangible: take a relatively small (5 per cent) share of excessive private wealth and direct most of it towards healthcare.

There is also the redistributive effect of the tax itself. If wealth at the very top has been accumulating far faster than it has for everyone else, taking some of that wealth back into the public realm can narrow the distance between the top and the rest – particularly when it pays for services on which people with the least depend most. That alone would be a substantial argument for doing it. But it may not be the most politically consequential one.

The perfect enemy

There is one thing billionaire taxation does exceptionally well: everyone knows who it is not about.

That is because, unlike “the rich”, “billionaire” has a very clear boundary. Someone earning 100,000 euros a year, a homeowner sitting on an expensive property, a successful small-business owner or someone who inherited a few millions might all be considered rich – or not – depending on who is drawing the line. And even well-off people have a tendency to draw that line somewhere just above themselves.

There is a distinctly populist logic to that structure. Political scientist Cas Mudde famously defines populism as dividing society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”. Few political demands draw that boundary as cleanly as “tax the billionaires”.

The billionaire line sits so far up the wealth distribution that almost nobody risks mistaking themselves for the target. Politically, that distance matters. “Tax the billionaires” singles out an extraordinarily small group while leaving almost everyone else standing on the other side. The “them” is remarkably easy to identify; the potential “us” is enormous.

California’s Proposition 40 makes that political divide unusually concrete: a little over 200 billionaires, according to the campaign, would be subject to the tax, while 90 per cent of the revenue would go towards healthcare. And it is precisely this ability to make distribution so immediately legible that gives the demand its wider political significance.

Across Europe, far-right parties have become adept at connecting experiences of insecurity – unaffordable housing, strained public services, stagnant wages, shrinking welfare provision – to immigration. The details vary between countries, but the underlying story is familiar: resources are scarce, ordinary people are losing out, and somebody else is getting what should have been theirs. Migrants, refugees, and welfare recipients become visible explanations for problems whose causes are considerably more complicated.

Part of the power of that politics is that it gives insecurity a direction. It tells people not only that something has gone wrong, but who is benefiting at their expense and, ultimately, who belongs on either side of “us” and “them”.

Progressive politics has often struggled to offer an equally legible account. For Greens, the problem can be particularly acute. Climate politics is easily caricatured by its opponents as a growing list of things ordinary people will have to surrender or pay more for: your car, your boiler, your flight, perhaps even your steak. However unfair the caricature, it pulls political attention towards what millions of people consume rather than towards who owns, accumulates, and exercises economic power.

“Tax the billionaires” points in a different direction.

Who are “we”?

There is nothing particularly new about politics trying to construct a “we” out of people who do not occupy exactly the same economic position. Political coalitions have repeatedly been built across existing class boundaries, and those boundaries have shifted as societies and economies have changed.

There are particularly striking precedents for organising those coalitions against concentrated economic power. During the New Deal years of the 20^th century, Franklin Roosevelt – himself hailing from an affluent family – railed against what he called the “economic royalists”. Thus, he was placing concentrated private power on one side and a much broader democratic coalition on the other. Decades later, Occupy Wall Street found an even simpler formulation: “We are the 99%.”

Neither required everyone inside the “we” to be economically equal. And “tax the billionaires” doesn’t either. A renter on a relatively high salary, a nurse who owns her home, a factory worker, a precarious university lecturer, a delivery rider and a small-business owner may have very different economic interests and may not understand themselves as belonging to the same class. Yet they all have something rather obvious in common: none is remotely close to being a billionaire.

That makes for an unusually broad political coalition – one capable, at least in principle, of bringing together people who might otherwise have little reason to see their economic interests as shared. But bringing people onto the same side of a political dividing line is one thing; giving them a common politics is another.

Roosevelt’s attack on concentrated wealth was attached to a much broader political project. The New Deal did not simply ask wealthy Americans to contribute more to public coffers. It strengthened collective bargaining, regulated finance, expanded social protection and public investment, and challenged aspects of concentrated corporate power.

Occupy’s “99%”, meanwhile, proved extraordinarily successful at changing the language through which inequality was discussed. The “1%” escaped the occupations themselves and entered mainstream political vocabulary. But turning that enormous “99%” into a durable political organisation or a common programme proved much harder. The billionaire version stretches the boundaries of that “we” even further, placing people with vastly different levels of wealth and economic power on the same side of the line.

But in so doing, it can also obscure the inequalities and conflicts among everyone who is on the same side. What is income to a landlord is rent to a tenant; what increases returns to shareholders may come at the expense of wages; what preserves the value of a large inheritance also preserves inequalities between those who inherit and those who do not.

In other words, the slogan “tax the billionaires” risks serving as a diversion from tackling inequality more broadly.

Beyond the billionaires

And there is plenty beneath the billionaire line to look at. A billion euros of private wealth does not appear from nowhere. It grows within an economy in which companies and land have owners, profits are divided between workers and shareholders, wages reflect very different levels of bargaining power, housing can function as both a home and a financial asset, and wealth can be passed from one generation to the next. Long before the tax authorities arrive, decisions have already been made about who owns what, who receives what, and who has power over whom.

This is where a distinction emerges between redistributing wealth and changing how it is distributed in the first place. A billionaire tax largely does the former. Once enormous wealth has accumulated, the state takes a share of it and redirects those resources towards society. That can make the final distribution less unequal – particularly when the money funds public services and social protection on which people with lower incomes depend.

Changing how wealth is distributed in the first place means intervening earlier. It means looking at workers’ bargaining power and how profits are shared; at who owns companies, housing and land; at what is publicly or collectively owned and what remains privately controlled; and at how large amounts of wealth are inherited across generations.

None of this is an argument against billionaire taxation; after all, it can raise substantial revenue, redistribute resources, and slow accumulation at the very top. Nor do redistribution and changing the underlying distribution need to be mutually exclusive. But if the politics ends at the billionaire line, much of what created the inequality on either side of it remains beyond reach.

Perhaps this is where the real political potential of “tax the billionaires” lies. The billionaire may be the most visible expression of a much broader distribution of wealth and power.

And this matters at a moment when the far right has become remarkably successful at explaining insecurity through competition between locals and immigrants over scarce resources. Billionaire politics offers a very different account: away from who might be receiving too much, and towards who has accumulated so much, how they did so, and what that accumulation allows them to do.

For Greens and the wider left, that offers something more than a new source of tax revenue. It offers the possibility of contesting the politics of scarcity itself. And in doing so, it unsettles the premise on which so much of that politics rests: that there is simply not enough to go around, and that politics is therefore a matter of deciding who among the rest of us must make do with less. Before accepting that ordinary people must compete over what is available – who gets the house, the hospital bed, the welfare payment or the secure job – it asks us to look at where resources and power have actually gone, who owns them, who controls them, and how they became so concentrated in the first place. And why, in societies capable of producing such extraordinary private wealth, does the political conversation so often begin with what everyone else must learn to live without?

That does not make scarcity imaginary. Housing can genuinely be in short supply, public services can simply lack capacity, and governments face real choices about resources. But those shortages do not tell us, by themselves, how the resources a society does have should be distributed, who should contribute more, or whose claims should be placed in competition with who else’s. Those are political choices too.

But constructing a convincing “them” is still easier than building a meaningful “we”. If that “we” is to mean more than simply everyone who doesn’t own a billion euros, it eventually has to acquire political content: what should be more equally shared, what forms of power should be challenged, and what people should be able to expect from the society they belong to.

That is why “tax the billionaires” is perhaps most powerful as the point of departure. It can raise revenue and redistribute wealth at the very top. But it can also serve to open a much broader argument about who owns companies, housing, and land; how economic power is distributed between workers and owners; and how much of the wealth societies produce should remain privately controlled in the first place.

The risk is that the politics stops at the slogan. The opportunity is that it does not.

Britain’s new prime minister has said that Brexit was a mistake and that the country should have a much closer relationship with the European Union. But is this possible without the UK again becoming an EU member state? And with the far right on the rise on both sides of the Channel, is there enough political will to undo Brexit?

They were the words many Labour supporters had been longing to hear. 

“Brexit has done more harm than good,” Andy Burnham told the 2026 Labour party conference. Later this year, he would lay out to Britons “what I believe the different options are for Britain’s long-term relationship with our European partners. I will see if we can find consensus around one.”

Yes, a decade after Britain narrowly voted to leave the EU –  and whether that meant the single market and customs union too was entirely unclear in 2016 – Britain is coming back. Maybe. If we can agree on what we want, and if the EU lets us.

The French president Emmanuel Macron welcomed the move, but warned that if the UK rejoined it would have to compromise. “You cannot choose between the freedoms of the Union and you cannot decide to take what suits you and not the rest. So come back.”

Britain can, however, try to sign up to some aspects of the EU without actually rejoining. This approach has plenty of downsides, which is why Brexiteers rejected it after the referendum, but it represents the kind of compromise that might be able to persuade a majority of Britons.

No one seriously pretends that Brexit has not damaged Britain’s economy. The question is how much independence the country is prepared to sacrifice in order to revive the trade and benefits it lost.

The Labour government is already trying to negotiate a better relationship with the EU than Boris Johnson’s Trade and Cooperation Agreement offers, though progress has been ponderous. In exchange for “dynamic alignment” on plant and animal health regulations, carbon pricing and electricity, and limited freedom of movement for young people, the UK would get smoother access in these areas.

A partial return?

Rejoining the customs union would mean that the UK could no longer set its own tariffs on imports and would have to abandon the ones it has negotiated since 2020. Like Turkey, it would have to agree a bespoke arrangement with the EU. This would cut a lot of paperwork, especially in manufacturing. But whether it could boost growth much would depend on the scope of the deal. This, in turn, would depend on the degree of regulatory alignment and the EU’s demands.

Another alternative, known as the “Norway” or “Swiss” option, would return the UK to the single market, but means paying into the EU budget (Margaret Thatcher famously negotiated a rebate, which the UK would be unlikely to repeat) and accepting freedom of movement. 

Andy Burnham’s rhetoric on immigration has been confusing. In his conference speech, he said immigration control had been “weakened by Brexit”. He was probably talking about the fact that Brexit means the UK can no longer return people who arrive on small boats to France. This is correct, but glosses over the practical and diplomatic difficulties of doing so. Alternatively, Burnham may have been implying that losing access to EU workers, who can move about freely without the need for visas, had forced the UK to recruit people from Asia and Africa instead. This is also true. But the desire to have more control over immigration was a main reason for the Brexit vote.

Burnham would need to convince sceptics that, because Central European countries are richer than they were in the 2000s, freedom of movement would not lead to another wave of new arrivals from the EU. He could point to the fact that only Britain, Sweden, and Ireland chose not to impose restrictions on those workers, which is why so many came. And he is right to imply that Brexit has not “solved” tensions over immigration, even if it has given Britain more control over legal migration. It is now Britons’ top concern.

But the EU could decide – as Macron hinted – that if Britain wants to rejoin the single market, it will have to go the whole way and sign up to the EU again. Simon Usherwood, a professor of politics at the Open University, thinks the EU would probably block the Norway option. 

“Negotiations would involve a lot of UK asking for exemptions and EU pushing back, partly because classic cherry-picking line, and partly because of precedents for other European Economic Area [EEA] states,” he says. Meanwhile, Norway and Switzerland may oppose it because the EEA is “designed for small, less-politicised countries”.

On the other hand, since the UK would have to accept EU rules without having any say in making them, we would no longer be able to try to veto the bloc – as we did in 2011 – or elect pro-Brexit MEPs like Nigel Farage who sought to disrupt it from within. The EU might appreciate that.

“Full-fat” rejoin

This has the advantage of clarity. It would give Britain full voting rights and is the obvious riposte to the question: “What’s the point of just rejoining the single market, when it means signing up to EU rules and getting no say?” Polling suggests that a pledge to rejoin the EU would win back voters whom Burnham needs, especially in Scotland and Wales.

“Half-baked calls to enter a customs union or join the single market won’t bring the transformational economic heft to avoid further drift and decline, or the political payoff to prevent Nigel Farage’s Reform UK gaining power,” says Naomi Smith, the chief executive of the pro-rejoin pressure group Best for Britain. “The choice Burnham must face is whether to go big – or go nowhere at all.”

But Burnham also knows that pro-Brexit parties are currently polling at 45 percent of the vote. And public support for rejoin fluctuates depending on what people perceive it to involve. If it means joining the euro, support falls. It will be hard to convince the public that the pound is safe if membership depends on committing to the single currency.

Then comes the question of whether Brussels will have enough confidence in Britain to start a rejoin process. Since all the right-wing parties are opposed to it, the UK can hardly be relied upon in the medium to long term. The irony is that the EU has also changed since Britain left. Far-right, often Eurosceptical, parties are on the rise. The single market will probably endure, but would the Labour party want to rejoin a bloc where France, Germany and Spain might all have far-right leaders?

The thought of another referendum is also unwelcome. It is difficult to argue that since Britain held a referendum on whether to join (in 1975) and leave (in 2016), it could rejoin without holding another one. Few of us will relish the culture wars it would probably stoke. Arguably, the amount of time Westminster spent on Brexit left some serious domestic problems to fester.

Among some Britons, too, there is a degree of stubbornness allied with an element of the sunk cost fallacy: we made our bed, so we might as well lie in it.

Burnham’s speech was the first piece of good news pro-rejoiners had had for a decade. No wonder they are excited. But they are going to need an awful lot of stamina.

This article was first published by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union. The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union | Global Dialogue.

As the fever dream of this summer’s scorching heat slowly subsides, nightmares from Europe’s past are lingering in waking life in the form of warships, bombs, and catapult stones. Still, a shared understanding of history remains elusive despite physical evidence of all that befell the continent. And while some of the walls that separated us have crumbled, new divides are forming in front of our very eyes.

London’s unforgiving, sun-bleached summer of 2026 has a dystopian, hallucinatory quality. As I write this, the city has not seen proper rain in 45 days. We swelter, unused to high temperatures. Air-conditioning in private homes is rare. People are suffering from sleep deprivation. Underground trains and buses are like ovens. A hosepipe ban has turned English lawns into dusty deserts of parched yellow and trees are shedding leaves to survive. We watch in horror as wildfires devour vast areas of France and seemingly everywhere else further south. Reports suggest that almost half a million hectares of European land have been consumed by flames so far this year.

Email exchanges with friends across the European continent frequently start and end with the weather. A distinguished university professor in Timișoara, in Romania, reports living as if under house arrest, with temperatures rising into the 40s. “In the end we will probably have a repeat of the 1980s,” she writes, “when, albeit for different reasons, there were constant power and running water cuts”. Our conversations about climate are increasingly coloured by a fatalism which seems, in many ways, more difficult to argue against than climate denial.

Skeletons of the past

Meanwhile, the falling waters of the Danube, Europe’s great East-West thoroughfare, are peeling back layers of European history in a way which makes the physical vulnerability of our present difficult to separate from the traumas of our past. In Hungary, the riverbed has surrendered centuries-old catapult stones and a live wartime bomb, causing a temporary bridge closure in Budapest. Further downstream, the wreck of a cargo ship materialised in Croatia, and the ancient remains of a woolly mammoth surfaced in Bulgaria. Most striking of all, a fleet of World War II German warships emerged from the river’s former depths in Prahovo, Serbia. Skeletons of the European past have never seemed so close to the surface.

Elsewhere, history is yielding its secrets through deliberate excavations. Joint archaeological teams from Poland and Ukraine are searching for the mass graves of up to 100,000 Poles murdered by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the Volyn Oblast during the last two years of the Second World War. This vast project is, in some ways, a belated example of the type examined by Katherine Verdery in her seminal book The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (1999).

In some ways, the passage of time and the exigencies of economic survival have achieved more progress towards reconciliation than the activities of expensive and sometimes self-serving international bodies set up to forge it.

The people of Eastern Europe, Verdery argued, suffered “cosmic disorientation” after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In order to re-anchor their sense of history, they turned to exhuming, moving, and reburying historical figures and national heroes, as well as counting victims of mass executions in an effort to reframe versions of the past they had lived with since the end of the Second World War. The materiality of dead bodies seemed to promise an “objective truth” in contrast to narratives coloured by communist ideology.

Ukraine may be spurred to cooperate with Poland by its desire to join the European Union, but “objective truth” requires more than a body count. Having witnessed perhaps the largest and certainly the most technologically advanced effort in human history, conducted on the territories of at least four of its successor states, and still ongoing, former Yugoslavia illustrates the limitations of such endeavours. Causes and effects of past events continue to be disputed to the extent that makes the idea of a shared, agreed version of history seem like a naïve dream. In some ways, the passage of time and the exigencies of economic survival, involving trade, shared infrastructure projects, or cross-border employment, have achieved more progress – however painfully slow – towards reconciliation than the activities of expensive and sometimes self-serving international bodies set up to forge it.

I am drawn to contested versions of history by the invitation to consider the current state of the East-West divide in Europe, and its transformations in the last 15 years. The evidence of this summer’s parched landscapes leads me to wonder if the North-South division is not already more critical. The seemingly unstoppable mass migration patterns are certainly speaking in its favour. Britain’s departure from the European Union in 2020 was largely driven by fears of uncontrolled immigration, yet when it comes to global movement, post-Brexit Britain and the rest of Europe continue to share the same problems. Desperate people walking and sailing into Europe from Sub-Saharan Africa or Taliban-ruled Afghanistan do not worry if their biometric passports are EES or ETA compliant.

Europe “as it used to be”

In an episode from the 2010 UK election campaign, broadcast live on British television, 65-year-old lifelong Labour supporter Gillian Duffy challenged the then prime minister Gordon Brown by highlighting immigration issues. “But all these Eastern Europeans that are coming in, where are they flocking from?” she asked. Brown offered a predictably anodyne public response. Some moments later, being driven away and forgetting that his microphone was still on, he commented to his aide that the conversation was a disaster and that Duffy was “just a sort of bigoted woman”.

The comment derailed Brown’s campaign by its suggestion of political arrogance, yet the so-called “Bigotgate”, highly damaging at the time, seems almost quaint today. Even the language used to depict the threat of immigration belongs to a simpler world. Instead of “flocking”, with its suggestion of birds that can potentially fly away as easily as they arrived, we now hear threats of biblical deluge, conquest and population replacement. The most prejudiced Brexiteers sometimes hint at nostalgia for the Polish plumbers of yesteryear and even a degree of envy for those plumbers’ as yet unspoiled homeland.

It might seem paradoxical that Poland, historically one of Europe’s most significant exporters of labour, is also one of the most vocal opponents of southern migration. It is not without its support in western social media, where countries such as Poland, Hungary, or the Baltic republics are often mentioned not as “New Eastern Europe” but as Europe “as it used to be”, evoking postcard images tinged with the sepia tones of false memory. Such nostalgia is often a conservative fantasy, a coping mechanism for the West’s own identity crisis and its diminishing social cohesion.

In 2022, I published Iron Curtain, a novel set in the mid-1980s, the dog days of communism. Its story linked an unnamed Soviet satellite state with Britain in the grips of its yuppie revolution under its Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher. I had lived through the era but the experience of recreating it on the page seemed at times as challenging as researching the French Revolution. In 1986, I arrived in London from socialist Yugoslavia, a country enjoying freedoms unimaginable further east and officially not behind the Iron Curtain. As a student I had criss-crossed Europe by train. Britain was less easily accessible. Airplane tickets were expensive and a single telephone call from London to my parents in Belgrade cost more than my current monthly mobile phone bill. We were so paralysed by the need to be succinct that our conversation often consisted of the same basic phrases, reassuring each other that everything was all right. Our steadiest link consisted of weekly letters: one means of communicating which has since become both more expensive and more unreliable.

What resurfaced with those memories, more than almost anything else, is a sense of the sheer physical distance between East and West, a void that is no longer there. My British students hop on an airplane to spend a weekend in Riga or Budapest with less forethought than, at their age, I gave to spending 48 hours in my grandparents’ village a hundred kilometres south of Belgrade. Could the distinction between East and West still be relevant, on either side of wherever that divide might lie now, when a whole generation of what would have been East Europeans has grown up benefiting from freedom of movement, buttressed by budget flights and a shared digital space?

Nostalgia is often a conservative fantasy, a coping mechanism for the West’s own identity crisis and its diminishing social cohesion.

Recycled concepts

Indeed, it sometimes seems that the East now has an advantage even beyond the conservative longing for an impossible return to safe, homogenous, and traditional societies. In The Historical Novel (1937), György Lukács described how an awareness of Europe was formed by the mass marches of the Napoleonic Wars, taking millions of people for the first time across their country’s border. Something similar happened at the beginning of this century, now in a benign context, when the borders of Western Europe opened to labourers from the East.

As reverse brain drain started to occur more recently, the West to East knowledge transfer brought with it an economic and digital boom in cities as far apart as Tallinn, Warsaw, and Cluj. It would appear that any notion of a simple binary opposition pitching a rich, democratic West against an impoverished East – unfree until 1989, then for many years lagging behind – has been replaced by a more complex, fluid set of ideas and values.

The concepts of East and West are still recycled, even if the West is no longer so sure of its progressive ideas; and the East is more ready to resist what it sees as western cultural impositions; and even if we are no longer so certain where exactly we are talking about when we talk about East and West. Again, it is in former Yugoslavia, once perceived as “the West in the East”, that the West continues to assert its superiority most confidently, even running Bosnia like an EU colony through its own appointed viceroy. The notion of “the Western Balkans”, now a common reference for those regional states still not in the EU, is part consolation prize, part insult. It is an oxymoronic designation devised by outsiders, and it makes no geographic sense other than to define a hole in Europe’s Balkan bagel.

Viewed from the West, this area is still routinely described in tones that are more redolent of Bismarck than of contemporary European debate. This is illustrated by a quote from a recent report published by the Robert Schuman Foundation: “In the Balkans, borders, regimes, dynasties, alliances and even the names of states are constantly changing … It is clear that today, Balkans or not, the region wants to be European. Yet will all these countries, having barely regained their sovereignty, easily accept Community rules which by definition imply limits to national sovereignty? Will the Community model suit them? After centuries of dependence, will they be able to tolerate a new form of federalism? And finally, can the European Union overcome the Balkan curse?”

There is profound irony in the fact that the report’s authors, the French centre-right politicians Jean Bizet and Fabrice Hugot, worry about the Balkan ability to accept limits to national sovereignty just at the moment when Western European nations are putting forward greater demands for sovereign border controls. To borrow their gothic turn of phrase, the curse may be European and not Balkan.

However, and whenever, the war in Ukraine ends, that new demarcation – between what Putin calls the ‘collective West’ and the shrunken, Russia-dominated East – seems likely to remain.

A new West?

Of course, it is impossible to discuss shifts in mutual perceptions between East and West while ignoring the fact that there is war in the East. I have argued elsewhere that the Iron Curtain was removed in 1989 only to divide Europe again in February 2022, this time several hundred miles further east from the Szczecin-Trieste line made famous by Churchill’s speech. However, and whenever, the war in Ukraine ends, that new demarcation – between what Putin calls the “collective West” and the shrunken, Russia-dominated East – seems likely to remain.

As we look at the parched earth of the South and the newly dug trenches of the East, yet another difference of perspective emerges from the geopolitical vice. It is the contrast between those countries in the European Union with direct memories of the Soviet Union and all too concrete fears of Russia, and those countries further West, with populations much more concerned with Israel and Palestine than they are with Ukraine. Their peoples are more influenced by the post-colonial priorities of the Global South than by fears of Moscow. To them, Gaza seems closer than Kyiv. It is easier, in light of such a divergent sense of existential threat, to pinpoint the “New East” than it is to locate the “New West”.

This article first appeared in New Eastern Europe. It is republished here with permission.

Caught between a return to an ecologically blind abundance agenda and degrowth environmentalism that offers no aspirational material vision, ecosocialism can choose a third option: a version of ecological modernisation that champions abundance within planetary boundaries. Revolutions in renewable energy and agriculture bring this outcome within reach.

 “The worst possible crisis, at the worst possible moment.” Xan López’s concise, clear-eyed diagnosis summarises the Left’s position 25 years into the 21st century. We are faced with a political turning point, one that threatens to wipe out democracy and the planet itself in one fell swoop. A reactionary political wave is surging, and must be stopped before it achieves the neoliberal goal of undoing all social progress made since 1945 – even the political progress made since the French Revolution of 1789 is under threat. At the same time, we must fight this wave while also decarbonising the planet within the next 25 years. Failure to do so could result in a climate breakdown that, if left unabated, could leave 3 billion people stuck in uninhabitable regions by the end of the century, thus jeopardising the very existence of civilisation as we know it.

These two colossal tasks will determine the course of our species long into the future, but both rely on the Left at a time when the movement is politically weak and poorly organised; perhaps the lowest point in its entire history. A strategic rethink is now an existential imperative.

The abundance agenda

In recent years, one proposal in particular has impacted the renewal of leftist policy: the abundance agenda. This paradigm emerged after the publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s 2025 book Abundance, and proposes that the Left cannot simply settle for the redistribution of scarce resources – it has to rediscover its own productivism and offer a new strategy for material expansion. In order to recover its ability to propel massive infrastructure projects – whether in housing, transport, or energy – Klein and Thompson propose that the Left must abandon its current political ethos of shying away from material change. According to their diagnosis, some progressives have retreated into a political culture of caution, regulation, protection, and the preventive vetoing of anything that could upset the established social balance, even when innovations could solve urgent social problems such as Western society’s housing crisis.

In many respects, Klein and Thompson’s book is too US-centric. Not all countries face the same obstacles of hyper-regulation as the US, and many Americans see their relative material stagnation as a sign of an empire in decline, in contrast to China’s rapid rise. Abundance received well-deserved criticism from the Left for its tendency to conflate democratic participation with bureaucratic stagnation, as well as for its centrist (or liberal, to a US audience) concern for the supply of goods while failing to question artificial scarcity, markets, or capitalist property structures.

Nevertheless, the book has resonated far beyond the US progressive scene because it highlights something that the Western Left is missing: that the possibility of restoring our power lies in rebuilding a tangible, compelling, and unapologetic promise of collective prosperity, just as it did in the 19th and 20th centuries. As Matt Huber, Leigh Phillips, and Fred Stafford write in their article “Abundance for the 99 Percent”, “The anarchists planned to take over the mines, not shut them down.”

One of the Left’s biggest political mistakes over the last 50 years has been limiting itself to protecting egalitarian moral values, thus handing the enticing rhetoric of aspiration and civilisation to the Right. However, simply expressing indignation and a desire to topple corrupt elites is not enough for a people to reach its full potential, something requisite for any process of transformation. There needs to be a horizon, an aiming point where things will one day get better. For much of the population – who suffer in precarity and acute material need, and who understand progress not as some tired teleological myth but as a legitimate expectation for survival – this “something better” will always entail an experience of material comfort, and even a certain degree of luxury, that the notion of abundance can offer.

There needs to be a horizon, an aiming point where things will one day get better.

Degrowth thinking

If this historically obvious idea seems provocative to large parts of the progressive community, it is at least in part because ideas of degrowth environmentalism are exerting an ever-growing influence on ecosocialism – and by association, on the Left as a whole. The term degrowth (and its sibling post-development, born from the Global South’s experiences of colonisation) covers a veritable galaxy of ideas that cannot be treated as a whole without straying into clichés. There is a huge difference between, for instance, Jason Hickel’s post-capitalist environmentalism – which champions degrowth via a global “Green New Deal”, a massive rollout of renewable energy – and programmes like that of Spain’s Adrián Almazán and Luis González Reyes, who challenge the renewable nature of any large-scale industrial technology and advocate for degrowth based on mass rural, economic, social, and community development.¹

However, some common ground remains. Both ends of the spectrum – though to varying degrees – criticise and reject economic growth; not solely from a moral standpoint, but also because it is biophysically impossible on a planet that is dangerously surpassing its ecological limits. Advocates of degrowth thus envisage a 21st century characterised by forced adaptation – with varying degrees of social disruption – to more constrained material conditions; a new era in which, compared with times of great industrial acceleration, various forms of relative and absolute scarcity will become the new norm. They argue that there is a metabolic bottleneck that technology cannot resolve, which will prevent us from continuing the rapid, expansive trends of the modern era – including population growth and mass urbanisation – that are an exception to the planet’s historical norm.

Under degrowth, future sustainability can only derive from a corrective shift towards more restrictive material and environmental conditions. Degrowth scenarios range from gently bringing ourselves within planetary limits to predictions of widespread impoverishment and the collapse of industrial society, a material step backwards that we would need to willingly embrace and prepare for in order to minimise its impact. The degrowth movement also argues that this historic transformation could be mitigated to some extent through redistribution, socialising consumption, and cultural transformations in our everyday lives. Out of these schools of thought, however, the most politically astute understand that environmental austerity is deeply unappealing to the masses, and instead highlight the social abundance that will follow and allow us to explore new ways of living beyond the modern age.

A non-Malthusian environmentalism

Ecosocialism’s slide towards degrowth is not just a product of capitalism’s broken metabolic systems – it is also fuelled by a cultural, ontological, and moral wariness of modernity as inherently alienating and oppressive, a shift that constitutes a refounding of the Left’s historical strategy.

In the late 18th century, Nicolas de Condorcet and William Godwin laid the axiological foundation of progressive environmentalism. They did this by arguing that, among all of humanity’s possible futures, there is potential for a virtuous circle between societal perfection and ever-increasing material abundance, a self-perpetuating loop that could be brought about through emancipatory political reforms. Thomas Malthus challenged this promise by highlighting the limits of nature as an obstacle that humanity could never overcome. Though his work focused on agricultural productivity – the great environmental cause of his era – his reasoning can be applied to all natural resources. For Malthus, the clash between nature’s limits and human expansion constituted a universal condition – one that is as tragic as it is unavoidable. Accordingly, he suggested that any future for humanity would require societal restrictions, because scarcity could never truly be overcome. As Ernest García points out, this idea shaped the logic and core arguments – now endlessly revisited and reformulated – of two centuries of debate among the Left and the environmental movement.²

Malthusianism has been one of the most vital schools of thought in the environmental movement, and should not be exaggerated or misinterpreted. However, in a distorted yet somewhat effective way, neo-Malthusian environmentalism has introduced the Left to one of environmentalists’ greatest contributions to philosophical thought: the notion of a natural limit that humanity’s social or technological will cannot overcome. This naturalist realism – or, to use Marxist terms, the relatively autonomous reality traditionally categorised as “nature” – offers a vital antidote to the Left’s socio-centric tendencies, especially because it reveals an ontological asymmetry that we are culturally programmed to deny: natural forces can be the undoing of any social project, but no social project can dictate the natural conditions of its own existence. For example, communism cannot magically reduce atmospheric CO2 levels, but a certain amount of atmospheric CO2 can thwart communism because it will thwart all forms of human civilisation. In the absence of this conceptual counterweight, contemporary humans tend to imbue technology with soothingly miraculous qualities, leaving ourselves unable to discern the dangers, harms, and pace of its environmental impacts.  

There is an undeniable cognitive benefit to the idea of a Malthusian natural limit, but it comes at a high cost. Politically, it leads us into very dangerous territory, while also instilling a whole series of scientifically flawed assumptions in our way of thinking. In terms of political dangers, Neo-Malthusianism backs us into a rhetorical corner. In the best of cases, its arguments can easily be interpreted as backing a process of voluntary adaptation to poverty. In the worst, it runs the risk of normalising reactionary ideologies that take root all too easily in society. Ever since Garrett Hardin’s lifeboat analogy laid the foundations of ecofascism, it has been clear that scarcity pairs well with competition, cruelty, hoarding, and the perceived right to defend one’s threatened living space. As Carl Amery was the first to point out – followed more recently by authors such as Andreas Malm and Bruno Latour – the rise of the new far right is inseparable from pre-emptive reactions to an ecologically saturated world, one where supremacists would rather kill than share.³

Transforming our countries into renewable electrostates must be the number one goal of any ecosocialist programme.

But apart from its political dangers, the Malthusian approach also has epistemological flaws – or, at the very least, it is confusingly open to interpretation when applied to specific historical situations. This is particularly true in a modern world-system of intensely interdependent global human networks, driven by unprecedented technological, economic, and scientific dynamism. While some maintain that the “Malthusian trap” persists in industrial civilisation, evidence has repeatedly disproved their warnings: Malthus himself was refuted, as were his intellectual successors, by the “population bomb” of the 1960s and Hubbert’s peak oil theories, which predicted the imminent decline of oil in the 2000s. Malthusian environmentalism’s predictions tend to be disproved because, while natural resources are limited, they are also unknown and dynamic. The resources we use in any given historical context are a combination of our planet’s material potential, variable economic incentives, and technological developments.

However, there is another environmental philosophy which has freed itself from Malthusianism’s problematic political and scientific influences, while also conserving some of its core truths. This current – which we can broadly call ecological modernisation – has often been scorned by the Left for its seeming collaboration with capitalist goals like sustainable development. It should not, however, be confused with its more extreme counterpart, ecomodernism, which advocates instead for a very particular form of radical Promethean modernisation, rejecting the precautionary principle in favour of technologies such as nuclear power, geoengineering, and transgenesis.

We can think of society’s metabolism like that of an organism: it ingests materials and energy (input) from its surroundings and excretes waste and alterations (output) into its environment. Malthusianism and modernisation disagree not only in how much they trust or distrust technology, but also on what stage of social metabolism is subject to ecological limits. Malthusianism identifies the input as the weak link, interpreting unsustainability as scarcity, whether in the form of shortages or exhausted supplies. Modernisation points to the output, viewing the limit as saturation: carbon sinks overwhelmed by pollution, and destroyed or disrupted ecosystem functions. This difference matters. Politically speaking, the first leads us to view sustainability as a forced reduction in human demand (or even population) in the face of dwindling natural resources, and the future as a zero-sum or negative-sum material game. The second leads to a radical redesign of our socio-ecological metabolism and technosphere, compatible with the promise of progress as a positive-sum material game.

Caught between a return to a classical, ecologically blind abundance agenda and neo-Malthusian environmentalism that refuses to offer the people an aspirational material vision, ecosocialism requires a push towards a third option: a left-wing version of ecological modernisation that champions abundance within planetary boundaries. This ceases to sound like an oxymoron when we consider that, at this very moment, productive forces are undergoing a genuine revolution that is, in its content, origins, and potential, worthy of the label “ecological”.

An ecological revolution

Thanks to Marx’s famous, oft-quoted prologue to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, a segment of Marxist thought has erroneously granted productive forces an almost automatic sense of historical agency. However, as philosopher César Rendueles argues, there is something about this tradition which, without any deterministic illusions, values the analyses of the social sciences and is politically worth championing: productive forces persistently condition both our relationship to the biosphere and the possibility of social organising. This can be both restrictive and empowering. The concept of productive forces is not, of course, simply another way of referring to technology, but a socially structured, politically oriented, and disputed understanding of it. This nuance is vital because the biggest historical impacts of productive forces were not the result of technology alone – they were rooted in its widespread adoption and through deliberate deployment and politically driven economies of scale.

Today, humanity stands on the threshold of three revolutions in productive forces that will expand the anthropological sphere, with potentially disruptive impacts on its evolution. Two of these deserve the title of “ecological” because they bring the goal of sustainability within reach while also increasing productivity – even when measured in environmentally and socially destructive capitalist terms. Both were also born of ecological movements: first the renewable energy revolution, and second, the regenerative agriculture movement. The third revolution, the digital-cognitive, is not inherently ecological – it could theoretically be deployed in such a way, but could also become another vector for contemporary devastation of the natural world.

From the earliest days of computing to the internet, AI, and robotics, the digital-cognitive revolution has commanded outsized attention, what Rendueles calls a kind of “cyberfetishism”.⁴ The Left has had a somewhat manic-depressive relationship with this technology, oscillating between the edenic naivety of the 1990s and present-day doomerism. Without a doubt, the fears that it raises in 2026 are justified by trends such as technofeudalism, surveillance capitalism, and tech’s contribution to 21st-century fascism. But these productive forces are also subjects to be debated. As authors like Aaron Bastani and Paul Cockshott have highlighted, their rise could offer huge opportunities for socialist causes in terms of economic and democratic planning and streamlining workflows: a literal communist “abundance” in exchange for little to no money. However, if the material abundance of the future is to be environmentally sustainable, then free digital information will never be more than an auxiliary – only a different relationship with the earth and energy can guarantee it.

This is what the regenerative agriculture and electro-renewable revolutions enable. The former combines traditional farming knowledge with cutting-edge science, and is revealing to us that soil, far from being an inert medium, is one of the Earth’s most complex ecosystems. Replacing practices that damage its structure with those that restore it can successfully maintain or even increase industrial agricultural productivity, while simultaneously restoring its fertility. It promises an encouraging evolutionary shift: to restart the Neolithic era and redirect primary biomass production towards restoring the richness of our ecosystems.

But renewables hold the key to a programme of abundance within planetary boundaries. The falling cost of photovoltaic and wind energy, as well as energy storage, is one of the most spectacular changes in economic history, and its rollout is progressing with unprecedented speed. China took 16 years to build the Three Gorges Dam, but in 2025 it installed solar panels with a similar capacity every three weeks. This energy acceleration is not limited to China. Pakistan, India, Kenya, and Vietnam demonstrate that one of the great virtues of the renewable energy revolution is that it will not be monopolistic, but distributed. This opens up a historic opportunity for autonomous development in the Global South.

This is unlike any other energy transition. In most of the world, there is currently no cheaper way to produce electricity than pointing a solar panel at the sky. More than any previous energy transition, the process closely resembles the introduction of microprocessors: a radical levelling that allowed billions of people to carry in their pockets a computer a million times more powerful than those used in the Apollo space programme.

What is happening today with solar energy and batteries is a similar evolutionary leap to the discovery of fire. To paraphrase Marx, we are on the cusp of leaving behind humanity’s prehistorical era of energy production, i.e. burning things. Over the coming decades we will stop regularly burning the molecules created by photosynthesis – whether biomass or fossil fuels – that have ruled our energy systems for a million years, and will enter a new world of unimaginable efficiency and abundance. We will use the free gift of sunlight to move electrons ourselves.

The Left should focus on politically challenging the energy transition in order to harness it in the service of an ecologically rigorous and socially inclusive modernisation.

To this we can add the fact that – thanks to the superior efficiency of electricity over fossil fuels – it is both technically and economically viable for us to electrify around 70 per cent of our material processes, offering a sovereignty, security, and democratising potential that goes far beyond the hypothetical. If we can grasp this, then we already know that transforming our countries into renewable electrostates must be the number one goal of any ecosocialist programme.

Degrowth environmentalism has questioned renewable energy’s ability to ensure a future of abundance through various arguments. The purely technological ones made some sense 15 or 20 years ago, but have now been empirically disproved. Objections regarding impacts on biodiversity are valid, but experience has also shown that renewable energy can be integrated with agriculture and ecosystems. When well managed, it can even enhance biodiversity by, for instance, restoring native vegetation beneath and between solar panels. Furthermore, mineral constraints do not jeopardise the viability of the transition where it matters most: renewable generation, grids, and storage. These are not especially mineral-intensive technologies, and are recyclable. However, it is doubtful whether we could electrify every single vehicle in existence, thus replicating the existing model in an electric version. Here, the bottleneck – at least with current technology – lies with batteries, not to mention that the current model of privatising public space for the benefit of the car has disastrous social effects that ecosocialism must combat.

The energy transition will, of course, expand the mining industry, but it is worth clearing up a misconception that degrowth has helped to spread: rolling out all of the infrastructure needed for decarbonisation over the next 25 years will require fewer minerals than just one year of fossil energy. Though this figure may seem surprising, it has a simple explanation: fossil fuel extraction produces outputs that are continuously burned. Once extracted and processed, metal minerals remain incorporated in the system’s capital as products with a long useful life, and they can also be recycled.⁵

New mines will undoubtedly open as a result of the green transition, and these processes may, depending on how they are handled politically, be violent and extractivist. But they could also be beneficial. The key lies in challenging them. The same happens with new renewables: if deployed under a capitalist logic, renewables in many areas exacerbate wealth accumulation via dispossession in the name of green progress, and provoke legitimate resistance.

But the ecosocialist’s job cannot be to simply question the widespread rollout of renewables, because this, however inadvertently, places them on the side of the fossil fuel industry. Instead, the Left should focus on politically challenging the energy transition in order to harness it in the service of an ecologically rigorous and socially inclusive modernisation. We can adopt the same kind of proactive, modernising political shift when it comes to issues relating to extractivism. Rather than flatly rejecting extractive processes when they could work against the fossil-fuel model, the ecosocialist left could approach them from the perspective of a new form of popular development. This would place the recovery of material sovereignty on the agenda, but take it beyond classical resource nationalism through strict conditions on investor access linked to technology transfer, cooperative trade frameworks, and the development of endogenous industrial policies.

Our generational mission is to harness capital so that, within 25 years, we can decarbonise the world, fully electrify the global productive structure, and distribute this new source of collective wealth equitably.

Ecosocialism for the masses

While new productive forces are broadening the horizons of ecosocialism with promises of newfound abundance, they do not eliminate the threat of the ecological crisis. We are faced with catastrophic shifts in the world’s climate that urgently require us to slow down, while also demanding a herculean effort to adapt – one which we are failing dismally to make. We continue to wipe out species at an unprecedented rate, and to self-destructively erode vital ecosystem functions. We also continue to exceed seven of the nine planetary boundaries: in 2025 we added ocean acidification to the six already identified (climate change, erosion of biosphere integrity, land system change, excess global freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, and novel entities).

The energy and regenerative transitions are the cornerstones of an ecological transformation of industrial metabolism. They can ensure its long-term viability, but they are not the only pieces of the puzzle. We also need a genuinely circular economy, with far-reaching ramifications, ranging from a new critical mineral recycling industry to a complete redesign of all production processes, including the abolition of strategies like planned obsolescence, which exist only to maximise capitalist profit margins. We need to ingrain various forms of consumption in society, starting with transport. We must also transform practices that are not, and will never be, sustainable in any conceivable scenario of ecological abundance, such as consumerism, throwaway culture, and the unprecedented dominance of meat in the contemporary diet.

None of these changes is easily compatible with neoliberal capitalism – even less so if we also aspire, as the Left should, to an ecological transition that is swift and just. These two features can only come in tandem. If the transition is not just, it cannot be quick, because grassroots opposition will hamper any changes. The reverse is also true; if it is not quick enough, it will be unjust for those most exposed to climate chaos, and for future generations who would be undeservingly condemned to a life of crushingly hostile conditions.

While renewable energy’s new competitive advantage has opened up a profitable niche that capital is already readily exploiting – ushering in a new frontier of accumulation, with all the social upheaval that this entails – ecosocialism’s work cannot consist of holding back this technological change. On the contrary, we must accelerate it through public control, and place it in the service of the common good. Our generational mission is to harness capital so that, within 25 years, we can decarbonise the world, fully electrify the global productive structure, and distribute this new source of collective wealth equitably. Although this may sound provocative, in this historical context of resurgent imperialism, with petrocapitalism morphing into fossil-fuelled fascism in petrostates (such as the US) that dictate the world order, green capitalism is not our main enemy. What is private today can be socialised tomorrow, but a “Hothouse Earth” scenario is irreversible: it would be an anthropological failure, one that would make life extremely harsh for countless future generations of humankind.

The chance to reconcile future abundance with planetary boundaries is perhaps the best news of the century.

Abundance within planetary limits is not some new, technologically enabled time extension that will allow us to continue the same ecocidal patterns that have made the Anthropocene an evolutionary dead-end. It does, however, offer a chance to radically transform our socio-natural relationship with political agendas that could – in contrast to the self-containment of Malthusian environmentalism – lead to a scientifically founded horizon of sustainability that actually appeals to the average person. This is ultimately why it is worth politically exploring the idea of abundance within planetary limits: it offers tangible benefits for political action. Climate action “for the people” will not result from an ontological shift or the moral equivalent of religious conversion; we will build it by challenging the “common sense” of our current anthropological moment, with all its fears, hopes, illusions, expectations, and politically calculated rules.

In a way, the chance to reconcile future abundance with planetary boundaries – thanks to the possibilities offered by an ecosocialist harnessing of new green productive forces – is perhaps the best news of the century. Despite an entrenched (and more than reasonable) sense of catastrophic doubt, we know today that a destabilised climate and biosphere have not, in historical terms, brought to an end what Marx taught us to call the Realm of Freedom. And if there has ever been a goal that works in our favour – one capable of uniting vast numbers of people and forging the sort of collective spirit needed to weather the many trials and tribulations along the way – it is this.

This article first appeared in Nueva Sociedad 323 / August 2026 in Spanish. It was translated by the Guerrilla Media Collective and is republished here with permission, with minor edits.

1. Jason Hickel: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, Random House, 2020; Adrián Almazán and Luis González Reyes: Decrecimiento. Del qué al cómo, Barcelona, Icaria, 2023.  ︎
2. Ernest García: Ecología e igualdad, Valencia, Tirant Humanidades, 2021.    ︎
3. Carl Amery: Auschwitz, ¿comienza el siglo XXI? Hitler como precursor, Madrid-Ciudad de México, Turner / fce, 2002.  ︎
4. César Rendueles: Sociophobia: Political Change in the Digital Utopia, Columbia University Press, 2017.  ︎
5. For a broad, exhaustive overview of advances in electro-renewables that speaks from a position of both activist compromise and academic rigour, see, Daniel Carralero, Marta Victoria and Cristóbal Gallego: Un lugar al que llegar. Mapa político de la transición energética, Madrid, Levanta Fuego, 2025.  ︎

Declassified documents reveal that, prior to the crossing of over 70,000 people from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in July, Spain’s intelligence services had passed a warning to Rabat. Still, Morocco let it happen, demonstrating once again that border externalisation exposes Europe to the whims of autocrats and leads to needless death and suffering. What can Spain and the EU learn from Ceuta?

Between the morning of 30 July and the evening of 31 July 2026, more than 70,000 people crossed into Ceuta, a Spanish city of 80,000 inhabitants on the North African coast, bordering Morocco. It was the largest single breach of the European Union’s external border on record.

At 1:52 pm on 29 July, an officer of Spain’s National Intelligence Centre in Ceuta informed the office of the government’s delegate in the city that calls were circulating online for a crossing “by fence and by sea” the following evening, on Morocco’s Throne Day. Facebook groups behind the call had around 180,000 members between them. That same day, the intelligence service alerted Morocco’s two intelligence agencies, the DGST and the DGED, and asked for their cooperation in stopping the plan.

We know all this thanks to 40 internal documents that the Spanish government later released, under pressure from both parliament and the courts. Yet the following morning, gendarmes on the beaches near Fnideq stood aside as tens of thousands of people – overwhelmingly young Moroccans – walked into the sea. At least 141 died, most of them in the sea off the Tarajal breakwater.

Within 72 hours, roughly 90 per cent of those who survived were back in Morocco. Most of them returned voluntarily, in cooperation with Rabat. Several thousand remained, among them more than 1,000 unaccompanied minors, who under Spanish law cannot be returned without a verified family placement, and applicants for asylum, whose removal is suspended until their claim has been assessed. Rabat has demanded that the minors be handed over.

Whether Moroccan authorities directed the crossing rather than merely failing to stop it remains contested. Pedro Sánchez told parliament on 3 September that during “the 10 central hours” of 30 July the Moroccan gendarmerie “permitted the crossing”, while maintaining that no proof had been offered that Morocco designed or executed the operation. But that is not the question that matters most. A state that polices its northern coast as tightly as Morocco does, and that two weeks later swiftly blocked a new online call to cross into Ceuta, does not just lose control for 10 hours by chance.

By design or by omission, the Moroccan state is responsible for the 141 people who died in the water. But other choices, too, made this tragedy possible.

A European failure

Two policy failures converged in Ceuta – one European, one Spanish.

The European policy in question is border externalisation. Since the agreement with Turkey in 2016, the EU has paid third countries to hold people back from its borders and has treated what happens to those people as a matter for the jurisdiction concerned. Libya in 2017, Morocco in 2019, Tunisia in 2023, Mauritania and Egypt in 2024; and now the Pact on Migration and Asylum, which extends the model rather than questioning it. Morocco receives more European border funding than any other state in North Africa.

Progressive forces have opposed this arrangement on humanitarian grounds for a decade. The countries the EU designates as safe are not safe for the people held in them, as the documented record of torture, rape, and abandonment in the desert makes plain. Moreover, defending the right to seek a life elsewhere means refusing to see people turned into a commodity exchanged between governments.

But Ceuta also exposes a second flaw in the model, one that governments indifferent to the first may find harder to ignore. Every externalisation agreement transfers to a third state a measure of control over the foreign policy of the state that pays. Turkey demonstrated this at the Greek border in 2020. Belarus demonstrated it against Poland and Lithuania in 2021. Morocco has now demonstrated it twice in five years, the second time on a scale seven or eight times larger than the first.

The EU believed it had purchased control over its external borders. What it has actually acquired is a set of dependencies, one per neighbour, each exercisable at that neighbour’s convenience.

Spain’s responsibilities

Spain, for its part, has pursued appeasement, attempting to secure a difficult neighbour’s goodwill through unilateral concession.

Morocco has used the border with Ceuta and Melilla as an instrument of pressure for decades. In 2002, it occupied Perejil, an uninhabited island close to the Moroccan coast but under Spanish sovereignty. In 2018, on the eve of Throne Day, it let several hundred people storm the Ceuta fence. In May 2021, after the leader of the Polisario Front – a Sahrawi nationalist liberation movement that fights for the independence of Western Sahara from Moroccan control – was admitted to a hospital in Spain under a false identity, some 10,000 people entered Ceuta in under three days while Moroccan police looked on.

Spain did not respond by reducing its exposure. Instead, in March 2022, Sánchez sent an official letter to King Mohammed VI endorsing Morocco’s Autonomy Plan for Western Sahara, reversing half a century of Spanish neutrality over the decolonisation of its former colony and doing so without a parliamentary debate and without consulting the coalition partner then in government. In June that year, at least 23 migrants and asylum seekers died in a crowd crush at the fence in Melilla – Spain’s other city on the North African coast – on the Moroccan side of the border, as Moroccan and Spanish security forces moved to repel a mass crossing.

Four years on, the customs posts at Ceuta and Melilla still do not operate normally, and Spain and Morocco have not resolved their airspace dispute. That concession taught Rabat that pressure at the border produces results.

In August this year, Morocco’s justice minister, a royal appointee, went on state television to claim Rabat’s “historic and geographic right” over Ceuta and Melilla, demanding a bilateral commission on their “return to the homeland”. In September, responding to the documents declassified by the Spanish government, Morocco’s foreign minister, Nasser Bourita, issued a statement accusing Spanish politicians and media of “strategic blindness”, warning that this would produce “recurring tensions”, and reminding Madrid that “geographic proximity is an immutable fact”. The two cities have since featured in Morocco’s parliamentary election campaign.

Yet until the hours preceding this summer’s crisis, the Spanish state still trusted Morocco to act on its warnings that a crossing was being organised. Madrid’s posture was to fully rely on the goodwill of a neighbour that had already used the border against it, five years earlier, to extract the largest foreign policy concession in decades – and to double down on a policy that had already caused unnecessary deaths.

A government that builds its regional policy on keeping a neighbour appeased loses the capacity to criticise that neighbour’s actions. 

Responsibility for this failure lies with Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE). Sumar, the junior coalition partner of which I am a member, has warned for years that the relationship built since 2022 would produce a tragedy like this summer’s. After 30 July, it has repeated in parliament that Spain suffered an attack in which people in extreme vulnerability were used as the instrument, that the explanation attributing the crossing to smuggling networks is not credible, and that the response was belated and inadequate. It has done so not with the intention to bring down the government, but to change the policy.

The reticence of the Socialist side is structural rather than personal. To name Morocco’s responsibility is to concede that the 2022 concession bought nothing. A government that builds its regional policy on keeping a neighbour appeased loses the capacity to criticise that neighbour’s actions. Five weeks passed before Sánchez addressed parliament. The summoning of the Moroccan embassy’s representative on 21 August was kept secret for two weeks, while similar episodes in disputes with Israel, Italy, and Argentina were widely publicised. The prime minister’s most recent formulation is that he “exculpates no one” and will act “with the utmost firmness” if solid proof emerges. Morocco, for its part, has informed Madrid that it is conducting its own investigation. It has not said who is conducting it or when it will report back.

Why Europe did not help

Madrid’s reticence explains why no case for European solidarity was made, but does not justify how the EU and some of its member states reacted.

On 31 July, Italy’s right-wing government threatened to suspend Schengen with Spain and blamed the deaths on Spain’s extraordinary regularisation of undocumented migrants, a process opened in January which had drawn more than 800,000 applications by July. No emergency Council was called. The Treaty’s solidarity clause was not invoked. A member state had suffered a breach of its external border on a scale never seen before, and the response from the other capitals was silence.

The reasons are not hard to find. Spain recognised the state of Palestine in 2024, has been the most outspoken European voice on Gaza, has declined to make its bases fully available for offensive operations in the US war on Iran, and has decided to regularise migrants rather than deporting them. For many European powers and for the US, these count as serious transgressions.

In the months before the crossing, several of Spain’s allies moved closer to Rabat. On 15 July, two weeks before the mass crossing, the US House of Representatives passed the State Department funding bill for 2027. The report the Appropriations Committee had published in April to accompany it described Ceuta and Melilla as “administered by Spain” but “located in Moroccan territory”, remaining “the subject of Morocco’s longstanding claim”. It also endorsed State Department efforts to facilitate dialogue on their future status. The report carries no legal force, and its sponsor has since described the wording as purely geographical. Still, it was the first time the US Congress put the Moroccan claim in writing.

Moreover, on 7 August, hours after taking office, Colombia’s new president, pro-Trump right-winger Abelardo de la Espriella, recognised Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in the presence of Morocco’s foreign minister, and three days later recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which international law considers part of Syria. Morocco is Israel’s closest military partner in North Africa. No coordination needs to be alleged for these facts to matter: aligned interests move in the same direction without a masterplan.

The Spanish Right has managed to play both sides. The right-wing Partido Popular (PP) and the far-right Vox spent the first days of the crisis in studied ambiguity, then rounded on Rabat, accusing Morocco of organising the crossing and Sánchez of covering for it. At the same time, they demanded the immediate return of the people who crossed, and said nothing about the US report on the “future status” of the two exclaves.

Severity towards those in the water, deference towards the governments backing the state that put them there: that combination is not a Spanish peculiarity, and progressives elsewhere in Europe will recognise it in their own opposition.

Another way forward

Spain, and the EU with it, built a border policy on the assumption that a neighbouring autocracy would act in their interest, and that assumption has now failed at a cost of 141 lives. What replaces that policy must start from a different premise.

The first needed change concerns the bilateral relationship. Every Spanish government has accepted that Morocco’s capacity to cause harm makes a working relationship necessary, and that is a reasonable starting point. But there is a difference between maintaining a relationship and organising an entire regional policy around keeping the neighbour placated. A relationship with Rabat that can survive Ceuta must rest on reciprocity that can be verified and consequences that can be enforced: accountability for 30 July before ministerial contacts resume at their previous level, auditable conditions on border cooperation, and diversification of Spain’s regional ties so that no single neighbour holds a veto.

There have been steps in the right direction: Sánchez visited Algiers in July to mend a diplomatic rift around Western Sahara, and on 10 September, the Spanish parliament approved a law extending nationality to Sahrawis born in the territory before August 1977, when the option to claim Spanish nationality granted at the end of colonial rule expired. However positive, these steps are not yet a policy.

The second necessary change is European. When Belarus pushed people towards the Polish and Lithuanian borders in 2021, the EU called it a hybrid attack, imposed sanctions on Minsk, and adjusted its legal framework accordingly. Applying the same standard to Morocco is the minimum. Beyond that, every externalisation agreement in force should be reopened to attach conditions and consequences, because funding without them amounts to a retainer rather than cooperation.

More fundamentally, the EU should reconsider its outsourcing model. That means offering safe routes that people can use without crossing a sea or a fence: work and family-reunification visas issued in countries of origin at a scale that corresponds to actual demand rather than to political tolerance; the possibility of applying for protection at European consulates and through humanitarian corridors, so that the right to asylum does not depend on surviving the journey; and mobility agreements negotiated with the countries migrants come from, as partners with interests of their own, rather than with the transit states through which they are pushed.

A shared European system of reception and relocation that does not leave the state where people first arrive to manage the consequences alone is also needed, alongside asylum procedures that take weeks rather than years, and the regularisation of those already present, because an undocumented population is the raw material of every form of exploitation. None of this is quick or cheap, but it removes the dependency at the root: a route that does not run through Morocco is a route Morocco cannot open or close.

The people who crossed into Ceuta on 30 July have rights that do not depend on why they crossed, and a border policy that does not begin from that fact ends by rewarding the state that used them.

The third change concerns the people at the fence. Treating the migrants as the threat shifts the responsibility away from the actors who sent them. The far right across Europe supplies that narrative, in Spain with demands for immediate pushbacks, and elsewhere with the argument that people used as a weapon may be handled as one. The two interests converge at the fence, and each relies on the other to keep the argument there. Refusing that argument is the only coherent answer. The people who crossed into Ceuta on 30 July have rights that do not depend on why they crossed, and a border policy that does not begin from that fact ends by rewarding the state that used them.

These three changes are not in tension. Defending the people who cross borders and defending the borders’ integrity are the same task. Any policy that does not recognise this is a recipe for more tragedies and blackmail by autocratic powers.

Freefalling agricultural yields, severe health problems due to rampant pollution, and livelihoods that have to be built anew: these are the daily realities of residents in India’s automotive manufacturing hub of Pune, where producers have for years disregarded environmental safeguards. And despite regulations mandating supply chain due diligence, components made in the region still make their way into the vehicles of Europe’s biggest carmakers. A Follow the Money investigation.

For 30-year-old Nilesh Mandikar, living in toxicity has become the norm. Sitting in his two-room home near Pune city, a three-hour drive from India’s Mumbai, he gestures at a sewage pipe discharging into an open plot some six metres away.  

“I had to stop cultivating fruits, grains, [seeds], and vegetables,” he says. “The soil at my plot degraded because of water pollution.” 

A foul smell lingers in the air; litres of green-white, foamy wastewater slurp from a big underground pipe into the open agricultural plot.  

Mandikar lives in Ambethan, an area part of a buzzing hub of multiple factories that are polluting the area. They produce components for cars that, an investigation by FTM shows, are then sent to Europe, where automakers – including Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, and Renault, amongst others – assemble them into their vehicles.   

While Europe is racing for a cleaner environment and is increasingly betting on electric vehicles, its car production has severe consequences in India, the investigation reveals. Having analysed data points on global trade data platform Panjiva, FTM identified more than 1,000 export shipments from three factories in Pune to Europe between April 2020 and February 2025. 

The shipments included, for example, electrical connectors, metal bars, or rots for the gearbox – key components for both electric vehicles and combustion engine cars.  

For Mandikar, the pollution had life-changing consequences. With failed harvests having become more regular, Mandikar has stopped farming over the past few years. He now works as a driver, earning some 280 euros a month. And he’s not the only one: almost 90 per cent of the farmers in the village have stopped farming due to similar reasons. 

This, like days when hundreds of dead fish floated dead in a river in the region, has sparked protests across the region, with hundreds of people gathering in front of the local municipalities multiple times a year – but with limited effect. Factories seem to keep flouting environmental rules.  

“Manufacturing companies and public administrations on both sides of the chain must fulfil their obligation to enforce environmental and labour regulations,” said Claudia Bosch, head of the Fair Electronics campaign, which advocates for ethical supply chains. “A change of model is needed, one that guarantees environmental protections and, consequently, the protection of affected local communities throughout the value chain, whether for electric or combustion vehicles.” 

Toxic waters  

Dubbed the “motor city”, Chakan city is the country’s largest automobile and manufacturing hub in the sprawling metropolitan region of Pune. It is home to some 40,000 inhabitants and over 750 factories. The world’s biggest car brands, like Mercedes and Volkswagen, have their own factories there. Even more carmakers source their components from subsidiary factories.  

Residents in Ambethan, the village in Chakan where Mandikar lives, see few benefits. They attribute much of the visible pollution – think water, air, soil, crops – to factories around them.  

“Continuous noise and air pollution from factories cause constant health issues,” Mandikar said, adding that these ranged from headaches and skin allergies to waterborne diseases. 

Balasaheb Padwal, another resident, echoed the assessment. 

“Sites of industrial waste being burnt [in the open] or heaps of plastic of polluted and colourful, smelly liquid being discharged openly into drains or in open plots are common,” he said. 

Amphenol Company that manufactures EV componets discharges waste water in open drainage in Bhosari in Pune. © Varsha Torgalkar 

Groundwater is yellow, and even a representative of the local governing body, who requested anonymity due to fear of repercussions, said he accepted that it’s no longer drinkable. 

Local residents FTM spoke to said that they used to get 2.5 tonnes of peanuts from one acre just a few years ago – now, they could only get 10 to 20 kilogrammes, they said – a fall of more than 99 per cent.  

Motherson Sumi factory is part of the industrial hub in the area and situated in Ambethan. A billboard at its factory gate claims that its pollutant levels are within permissible levels – but that doesn’t seem to reflect reality: its wastewater exceeds toxicity limits.  

Reporters collected untreated sewage samples from the location where Motherson Sumi factory discharges its wastewater for Follow the Money and sent it to a lab. The test shows chemical oxygen demand (COD) of more than 2,200 mg/l – several times above the legal maximum of 600mg/l for water discharged into a public sewer, or 250 mg/l for inland surface water. COD measures how fast contaminants in the water can be gotten rid of, meaning that high levels of COD indicate higher levels of pollution. Similarly, the water’s biochemical oxygen demand – which measures specific pollutants such as pesticides and industrial chemicals – is almost double the legal limit.  

The building of village local body at Ambethan in Chakan of Pune. Mothersonsumi in Ambethan pollutes fertile soil land. © Varsha Torgalkar 

Shailaja Deshpande, environmental expert and the founder and director of Jivitnadi Living River Foundation which works to protect rivers in Pune, said that the heavy metals shown in the lab results were “directly connected to the food chain and extremely dangerous” for human health and aquatic life.  

“The raw sewage and soil reports are not only alarming but scary,” she said. “Both results convey that the water and soil both are extremely contaminated and not only harmful to humans, aquatic and terrestrial life but will be retained in water and soils for longer periods.” 

Motherson Sumi declined to comment. 

The situation doesn’t look much better in other parts of the Pune region.  

About an hour’s drive further south sits the Amphenol factory. There, the factory seems to be discharging untreated wastewater into open drains, which flow into the Indrayani and Pavana rivers. A lab analysis shows that the soil surrounding the factory contains heavy metals cadmium and nickel – both above safe limits under Indian law.  

© Varsha Torgalkar 

The two metals are highly toxic and pollute the environment, including agricultural land and water. Cadmium can also carry severe health consequences, such as renal dysfunction, bone demineralisation and respiratory problems. Nickel, meanwhile, can cause cardiovascular diseases and respiratory issues and increases the risk of cancer.  

Since it doesn’t corrode easily, cadmium was widely used for steel plating; because of its toxicity, it is heavily regulated in some parts of the world and carmakers have switched to alternatives. However, it is still being used in electrical connectors and some specialised coating, for example. It rapidly seeps into groundwater and accumulates in the food chain.  

Nickel, meanwhile, is used to produce batteries for electric vehicles, as well as to build wheel components and spark plugs, amongst others.   

Both rivers into which untreated wastewater gets discharged supply drinking water to over 5 million people, and irrigate hectares of agricultural land that provides food to millions.  

Nickel and cadmium levels are elevated across the region and exceed safe thresholds in vegetables such as spinach and cauliflower, a 2025 study found.  

Prashant Raul, an activist who runs an environment collective in Pune, warned of the long-term consequences.  

“Farmers cultivate crops in toxic soils with polluted water and consume poisonous food,” he said. “The percentage of diseases caused by pollution, like cancer, is highest in India.”  

In Dhayarkar Colony, near the Bharat Forge factory further south in Pune city itself, residents complain of similar issues.  

With the factories in the vicinity dumping their wastewater into the surrounding fields without a proper drainage system being in place, an unpleasant odour hangs in the air – and the freestanding water seems to carry its own health risks.  

Not far from the Bharat Forge factory, Abhijit Gaikwad is frustrated.  

The 37-year old activist sees that even groundwater extracted from deep underground is polluted, carrying a yellow and black colour. While residents didn’t drink the water, they still had to use it for washing their clothes and bathing, he said. 

“Residents have to use [that water] every day,” he said. Other residents in the area complained of the same issue.  

This hasn’t gone unnoticed by authorities.  

In 2021, the region’s pollution control authority MPCB asked Bharat Forge, given irregularities in the factory’s measures to prevent pollution, why the “unit shall not be directed to close down the manufacturing activity”, and instructed to file a corrective action plan within a week. 

Activist Abhijit Gaikwad and local residents with a letter of complaint against Bharat Forge to submit to Maharashtra Pollution Control Board. © Varsha Torgalkar 

The warning, obtained by FTM through Freedom of Information requests, found that oil was being discharged in open water outside the factory, and that the sewage treatment was not working at full capacity.  

Three years later, however, the factory was still operating – and received more warnings. In April 2024, the same control authority issued a warning notice to the factory, reprimanding it for showing “negligence towards pollution control and environment protection”.  

“You are therefore instructed to submit [a report on] your action taken … within 7 days,” the control board warned.  

Yet, half a year later, the control board sent another letter to Bharat Forge, asking it to submit details of how its oil was being stored on the premises. And in early 2025, the authority issued yet another warning – this time about complaints about noise and air pollution in the residential area surrounding the factory.  

For activist Gaikwad, who has been sounding the alarm about the pollution for years, the fact that Bharat Forge is still operating shows the lack of teeth the control board has.  

Even if factories are found to be violating the country’s environmental laws, enforcement is inconsistent. For manufacturers, risking fines is often less costly than compliance. Proper wastewater treatment often costs hundreds of thousands of euros. And while environmental penalties could, in theory, be expensive, they are rarely enforced, and barely any closure orders are issued.  

Palak Balyan, research lead at Delhi-based environmental organisation Climate Trends said that “industry in India is a huge contributor of particulate matter and other kinds of pollution”.  

Manufacturers were discharging heated, toxic wastewater that harmed the flora and fauna, he said.  

“They also emit fumes that cause air pollution, ultimately affecting human health and contributing to global warming,” he said. “This pollution also increases heat and affects the ozone layer. This industrial pollution, proven through research, causes severe health issues like diabetes, water-borne diseases, and cardiovascular diseases, among others.” 

Europe-bound 

From Pune, the components are sent to Europe to be assembled into vehicles. FTM tracked components, such as gear parts, electronic connectors, wiring harnesses, and other  vehicle modules that likely ended up in the supply chain of Audi, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Volkswagen.  

An analysis of trade data shows that  987 shipments from Pune – from Motherson Sumi, Bharat Forge, and Amphenol – to Spain between April 2020 and February 2025, with a combined declared value of approximately $24.5 million, according to Panjiva customs data.  

About a third of them went to the automotive cluster in the northwestern region of Aragon, which includes around 300 companies; some of them are based near Zaragoza city. It is one of the country’s leading manufacturing hubs.  

Motherson Sumi has a subsidiary in the hub: SMR Automotive Systems Spain. That subsidiary, in turn, supplies a bigger European automotive sector. The subsidiary owns two assembly and manufacturing plants in northern Spain: SMP Ibérica SLU, in Palencia, and SMP Automotive Technologies, in Teruel. Electronic components are sent from Pune to produce exterior and interior mirrors, and vehicle modules for Audi, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Volkswagen. The supply programmes include regular, electric, and hybrid cars. Its main customers in Spain are Ford, PSA, Renault, Seat, and Volkswagen. 

Bharat Forge also sends parts to Aragon. It supplies Zaragoza-based Dana Automocion S.A., a leading manufacturer of technologies that makes components, parts, and systems that transmit engine power to the wheels, enabling both traditional and electrified cars to move. Dana Automocion, in turn, supplies Stellantis Zaragoza, according to a Spain-based industry expert. That factory produces cars for Peugeot, Lancia, and Opel.  

Waste water discharged by Amephenol flows in this open public drainage system that runs in the river. © Varsha Torgalkar 

The factory also sends shipments to Etxetar S.A., from which General Motors and Jaguar buy assemblies, and works  with Volkswagen, Volvo, and Ford. 

Amphenol, meanwhile, ships components to several Spanish distributors with a value of almost 6.5 million euros between April 2020 and February 2025. From there, these parts are likely to end in the supply chains of big European brands.  

Mercedes-Benz Spain and Audi told FTM that they are asking suppliers about the case. No other car company or brand responded to requests for comment. 

Another route through which components produced in Pune reach Europe is Morocco.  

Motherson Sumi also has a subsidiary – the Samvardhana Motherson Reydel Autotecc Morocco – in Tangier. There, it manufactures interior modules for Renault cars. The Motherson Sumi factory in Pune sent components to its branch in Morocco until at least mid-2022. The vast majority of Renault’s Morocco output is exported to Europe. 

In total, FTM traced more than 1,000 exports of components from Pune to Spain and Morocco from April 2020 to April 2025.  

Green promises 

The discovery comes amid pledges by the world’s biggest companies to invest in greener technology. 

Stellantis, for example, says on its website that it is aiming to have “a broad positive impact on the environment”.  

This, the company says, also applies to its suppliers. “Our strategy consists in selecting suppliers according to environmental criteria … or their ability to develop products which incorporate green or recycled materials,” the firm says. 

In a similar vein, Renault insists that “compliance with social and environmental requirements is part of both the supplier selection process and supplier relations”. 

And Volkswagen declared that all suppliers underwent a risk analysis, with environmental and human rights being key aspects. “These criteria are mandatory and binding,” a spokesperson for Volkswagen said in an interview. 

But having criteria doesn’t necessarily mean that firms can wash their hands of responsibility for environmental harm in their supply chain. 

Under the German supply chain law, in force since 2023, companies with more than 1,000 employees have to identify and prevent human rights and environmental violations in their supply chains.  

This means that German companies like Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen have to make sure that when they buy components from factories or middlemen, environmental laws are respected if they impact human rights.  

And that goes beyond simply asking suppliers to promise they are respecting the standards or relying on compliance signs posted at factory gates, says Finn Schufft, a policy advisor on corporate accountability at Germanwatch, an NGO that analyses environmental policies. 

“Relying on reported data by suppliers is not usually enough to meet the standards of the risk analysis required,” he said. “Where companies have reason to believe that there has been a violation, they cannot shield themselves with compliance data from suppliers, but need to take active steps to verify the information.” 

While communities can file complaints with German authorities if they believe that the companies aren’t living up to their due diligence obligations, this doesn’t seem to have yielded tangible results so far. 

“To date, the supervisory authority, to our knowledge, has refused to issue any concrete orders to companies or impose sanctions for violations of the Act,” said Schufft.  

Fair Electronics campaign’s Bosch echoed the assessment.  

“With electric vehicles, we want a just energy transition,” she said, “not a continuation of North-South inequalities or the externalisation of socio-environmental impacts on communities and territories of the Global South, as has been happening with combustion-engine vehicles”.  

Other companies that aren’t covered by German law, however, only have to abide by international law – which is less strict for environmental standards. 

A European-wide law, the corporate sustainability due diligence directive, aims to address that. It imposes similar obligations on companies with more than 5,000 employees and a net turnover of over 1.5 billion euros. 

All carmakers mentioned in this article would fall under the criteria. 

But although it entered into force in 2024, the law will only apply from 2029, and fines will be capped at 3 per cent of a firm’s net global turnover.  

For Mandikar, those laws are too little too late.  

“Common citizens like [us] who have no power except for one vote in elections cannot bring change,” he said.  

He looks at his poisoned land one last time before walking back to his home, just a stone’s throw from the discharge pipe. The factory hum never stops.  

This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe. It was originally published by Follow the Money. 

With parts of the feminist movement drifting towards personal empowerment and green actors emphasising cost of living issues, few voices remain connecting the dots between ecological and feminist struggles. Yet studies show that rising temperatures increase domestic violence, and women are more heavily impacted by food scarcity during draughts and floods. How to build counterpower at times of gender and climate backlash? Ros Taylor spoke with the author of Feminism for a World on Fire. 

When I meet Natasha Walter towards the end of August, Britain’s arid summer is at last beginning to ebb. A few drops of rain have fallen on the yellow, desiccated parks, but not enough to revive them. In the past eight weeks, north London has had just two millimetres of rain.

But the drought and wildfires barely impinge on the political round. Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, belatedly sends a text message to Britons urging them not to light unnecessary fires. His new secretary for energy security and net zero, Miatta Fahnbulleh, will open up a North Sea gas field for drilling. Her Conservative shadow, Andrew Bowie, declares himself the “energy security secretary”, dropping any reference to net zero.

As temperature records are broken, the fight seems to have gone out of Britain’s environmental movement. Perhaps they expected the proof of global heating and multiple energy crises to concentrate politicians’ minds on the green transition. If so, they were very wrong. Instead, the talk now is almost exclusively of adaptation and how to generate enough electricity for air conditioning. Even the Green Party now mainly focuses on the cost of living and overheated workplaces. This has helped them in the polls, but it has done little to keep up the pressure to phase out fossil fuels.

Climate of repression

For activists like Walter, who was arrested in 2019 at a climate protest, the sense of powerlessness is distressing. Even as the Labour party made progress on decarbonising the grid and expanded wind and solar energy, it continued to crack down hard on environmental protesters. Judges imposed long prison sentences on people blocking roads and prevented them from mentioning their motives in court, so as not to sway a jury. In 2024, nine people who were arrested on their way to a planned action at Heathrow Airport spent ten months on remand before they appeared in court. The harsh sentences have significantly reduced climate protests in the UK. The government has also designated the pro-Palestinian group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, meaning that anyone who expresses support for it is liable to be prosecuted for a criminal offence.

“I feel so angry about it,” Walter says. “I really feel that there was a possibility when the first wave of climate activism was happening. You know, around 2018, a lot of people were taking to the streets. It was disruptive, [though] it wasn’t terribly disruptive to most people’s everyday lives. And I think it brought a lot of people together. It coalesced a sort of sense of urgency, and the community around that urgency.”

“And I think that some mainstream political parties on the left or towards the left could have done a lot more to connect with that energy, to learn from why people were coming out, and actually to support that energy and work with those desires to find ways forward. I find it really so baffling. And I feel so angry with this Labour government.”

She admits some of the actions “weren’t brilliantly planned or executed” – Just Stop Oil activists throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery in 2022, for instance – “but that’s OK. These sorts of movements are messy. But I just find it insane, the level of repression, and how little mainstream liberals and conservatives, left and right, have stepped up to this.”

Time for ecofeminism

Walter came relatively late to climate activism. In The New Feminism (1998), she argued that women needed to stop policing each other’s behaviour and focus on securing political power and equality. Living Dolls (2010) tackled the sexualisation of culture and what it meant for women. Her latest book, Feminism for a World on Fire, imagines a feminism that acknowledges what the climate crisis means for women, especially but not exclusively in the Global South. Feminism, she argues, has let itself be subsumed by the consumer society and dreams of personal empowerment. It has stopped being political. She wrote Feminism for a World on Fire partly out of a sense of frustration that the environmental movement in the UK seemed to have no space for ecofeminism.

“When I was in Extinction Rebellion, I was really struggling to get women together to talk about feminist ideas in the environmental movement.” There was an emphasis on care, she says, and feminist principles guided the movement, but somehow it did not quite come together. Yet, for Walter, the movements are meaningless without each other. “Environmentalism without feminism is a patriarchy in the forest, but the women’s movement without environmentalism is a women’s centre on a dead planet.”

Bringing the two movements together is all the more important when mainstream feminism has become a marketable commodity to which the big tech companies pay lip service, and where women must climb over each other to reach the top. She says “this rhetoric of Lean In, ‘You go girl, give zero fucks, keep moving on, keep moving up’” reached an apogee in 2025, when Amazon’s chairman Jeff Bezos launched six women into sub-orbit to promote his Blue Origin space programme.

Feminism has let itself be subsumed by the consumer society and dreams of personal empowerment. It has stopped being political.

“The interests of capitalism feed off that kind of self-empowerment. It suits capitalism. You can sell women more goods, more stuff with the message that you can liberate yourself just through shopping, through constant makeovers and renewal… I was quite shocked when I started using Instagram by how many women that I thought of as feminists are engaged there in just selling stuff.”

Platforms have enabled some women to establish vast personal brands, but have also fed a form of apolitical narcissism. In the past decade, Walter says, the women’s movement has atomised, with “less and less empathy and solidarity between women from different parts of the world and different backgrounds.”

As director of the charity Women for Refugee Women, she found herself increasingly frustrated by performative, celebrity-driven events that felt very distant from the lives of ordinary women. At the same time, charities working with vulnerable women became more professional. There is more transparency and clearer guidance about how to act, but something has been lost. In the 1980s, one activist told her, women who reported domestic abuse would be supported, driven to a refuge, and hugged. “Now I see my colleagues taking that same call. They are polite. They go through the safeguarding checklist. They give her another number to call…” Grassroots work is vital because it is “where women find the tools for survival”.

In the UK, the Rochdale child sexual abuse scandal, where girls were raped by groups of men of mainly Pakistani origin between the 1990s and 2010s, has become a rallying point for the far-right Reform UK and Restore parties. They claim that the failure to prosecute the rapists for years shows that feminists did not protect girls for fear of being seen as racist. Walter, however, argues that the scandal persisted because the police did not listen to women working in frontline organisations.

She has spent time with women’s groups in the Middle East, and Feminism for a World on Fire reminds readers that however frightening global heating seems in Europe and the US, it has even worse consequences for the Global South. The impact specifically on women is under-researched, but the work we do have shows that women are more likely to die than men when food is scarce and during droughts and floods. Domestic violence rises during climate crises. A UN study found that it increases by 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature. Another study on heatwaves in Kenya found that pregnant women were vulnerable to cardiovascular problems in high temperatures and were still expected to collect water. Feminism for a World on Fire reminds readers that however frightening global heating seems in Europe and the US, it has even worse consequences for the Global South. The impact specifically on women is under-researched, but the work we do have shows that women are more likely to die than men when food is scarce and during droughts and floods. Domestic violence rises during climate crises. A UN study found that it increases by 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature. Another study on heatwaves in Kenya found that pregnant women were vulnerable to cardiovascular problems in high temperatures and were still expected to collect water.

Domestic violence rises during climate crises, 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature.

“When societies are stressed, men are often taking out that stress and that precarity on women … It’s here, it’s now. You know, women’s crops are already failing because of the droughts and then the cyclones in Malawi. The girls living in the areas affected by floods in Bangladesh, they’re already missing out on school, they’re already being married off early. Their future is gone.”

Involvement at all levels

How to conclude a book that sets out the scale of the crisis and the misery to come? Walter admits it was difficult. She feels the least satisfactory sections of her previous two books about feminism were her efforts to direct people to organisations that were doing good work. Instead, “We need to have more faith in the idea that we can get involved in our community,” and organise to achieve a particular goal.

She is drawn to local activism, partly as an antidote to the sense of powerlessness that has seized the environmental movement, but also as an alternative to the endless scroll of digital “engagement”, a “relentless roll call of pain” – and because, as 1980s activists knew, only by meeting people face-to-face do we come to understand the messy complexity of their lives.

Walter acknowledges that the kinds of frustrations and compromises involved in unglamorous, local activism are by no means easy. “I’m not romanticising it, but I think it’s the only way to rebuild in the face of what we’re facing now.” Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book End Times Fascism offers a similar vision for local activism in the face of Big Tech dominance and the rise of the far right.

I ask Walter why so few women, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez excepted, are leading the charge against Trumpian politics and environmental destruction. Zohran Mamdani is the great hope of socialists in the US, and the figureheads of the British left are men: Zack Polanski leads the Greens in England and Wales, while Labour has never had a female leader in its entire history. The European far right, by contrast, has cultivated several charismatic women leaders, including Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel, and Marine Le Pen.

“I think women who try and emerge on the left as leaders just feel too disruptive,” Walter says. “They break the mould of what our societies want to see in women too much, and they’re not valued. They face such a barrage of misogyny from their enemies. It just makes them unviable as leaders, as we saw with Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. I’m not saying they were particularly charismatic or progressive leaders. Very problematic, I think, in many ways.” Both the former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and Finland’s Sanna Marin left frontline politics before middle age also because of intense backlash.

But the fact that female leadership is lacking should not deter women from getting involved. “We need more women climate leaders. But I also think we need more good followership. I think we need, as women, to get involved in stuff.”

“And you can make a change by contributing whatever you contribute. I really like telling stories and drawing out threads. But I also like doing the other stuff, just standing at the stalls at the eco-fair or going along and helping in the community garden or with the drop-in at the women’s centre.”

Stepping up

An earlier generation of radical feminists might observe that this is what middle-class British women like Walter have done for centuries – volunteered in their communities, unpaid and largely unnoticed, meeting the needs that the state will not. Is this a flight from catastrophe into the private sphere, a 21st-century version of Voltaire’s il faut cultiver notre jardin? But Walter’s feminism is anchored in the city, in the marches and demonstrations she still regularly attends. “I’m not much of a hippy. I’m living quite a normal urban life. People see ecofeminism in a maybe more radical and hippy box than that, and I’d like to say no, this is for everyone.”

Walter’s feminism is alive to the cruelties that emerge when people compete for scarce resources. As a charity leader, she saw “such divisions between women, hardening borders, that dehumanisation that creeps into people’s rhetoric”. In the UK, where groups of black-clad, balaclava-wearing men have been gathering to block roads and demand Britain “stop the boats”, the sense of fracture is acute. The Left observes bitterly that when climate protesters – some of them elderly women – lay down in the street, they were put in jail: the men of the far right, on the other hand, have been allowed to disperse without being arrested.

Towards the end of the book, Walter recounts seeing on her phone images of “the body of a female fighter being thrown from a building” in north-east Syria, where she had visited a group of women planning a better future. She tries to apply the lessons she learnt there about female solidarity in London, too. “When I feel really lost about the way forward it’s often the women around me who keep me going,” she writes. None of them “only spend their time asking other people to do things… They use their own talents and courage, and put them to work.”

The EU has placed competitiveness, industrial renewal, and strategic autonomy at the centre of its agenda. But will these ambitions support the green and social transition, or become a pretext for deregulation and a weakening of Social Europe? The General Director of the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), Andrew Watt, explains what this changing political landscape could mean for workers and trade unions and social policy – and for the kind of economic model Europe is building.

Seden Anlar: Competitiveness, strategic autonomy, industrial policy and deregulation are rising up the EU’s political agenda, while the bloc is also navigating war, energy shocks, trade tensions, competition with China, and growing uncertainty around the United States. Where do you see Europe within these overlapping pressures, and what kind of transformation are they driving within the EU?

Andrew Watt: Europe is changing because the world is changing. There are longer-term trends driving that change, like demography, decarbonisation, technology, and now AI. Then there are shorter-term developments: war, the dislocation of the global political system, the behaviour of powers like Russia, but also our erstwhile ally, the United States, and renewed inflationary shocks.

For populations, policymakers and trade unions, most of these changes are initially perceived as threats. They constrain our fiscal resources, for instance. We spent a lot of public money getting out of the Covid crisis and dealing with the inflation crisis. That reduces the size of the cake available today, for example for social policy.

Then there is the demand from the US and from many Europeans for a more autonomous European defence policy, and that is going to cost money. We also have the burdens associated with ageing. So if you take the fiscal situation as a focal point for all these things, you can see how pressure is building in the system. We are going to have to face up to some trade-offs and make some difficult decisions.

But I don’t think it is all negative. Some of the responses we are seeing – industrial policy, a more critical attitude towards trade, a greater role for governments and perhaps, hopefully, for the European Union itself – are things that some of us have wanted for a long time.

There is that old story about Europe progressing through crises. It is often only when crises come that the political space opens up to take steps we think are anyway necessary .

How is this broader transformation affecting Europe’s economic model? Are we moving towards a genuinely different model of EU economic governance, or are older political-economic cycles returning in new language?

We have seen some considerable changes, and we are seeing pressure for further change. The open question is whether it is going to be enough.

If we understand economic governance as both what the EU itself can and cannot do in economic policy, including through the EU budget, and the framework within which national governments conduct economic policy, then there have been important changes. We had NextGenerationEU and the Recovery and Resilience Facility, which was a substantial investment package. It broke new ground in terms of European-level borrowing, with money distributed to member states to enable them to invest when they otherwise would not have been able to, and the debt being paid back at the European level.

This was actually a big deal, but it was temporary. What we need is something like that, or even something more ambitious, on a permanent basis, and there is considerable resistance to that. We just about managed to get political support for NextGenerationEU on the understanding, in some capitals – I won’t mention any by name – that it had to be temporary. Making something like that permanent is really a sort of Rubicon. There are some decisive member states – all member states are important, of course, but some are more important than others – where there is resistance. I would hope that we take that step, but whether we do or not remains to be seen. The fact that the market for US government bonds has come under considerable pressure could, and I believe should, serve as a window of opportunity here.

We have also seen changes to the national fiscal rules. They have been revised in a good direction, but still not enough. The decisive thing we still do not have is the ability for governments to invest and to borrow in order to invest without coming up against legal constraints.

There is now an opening for more spending, but it is for defence spending. Defence may also be necessary, but we do not have that same opening for other forms of investment, and the multipliers from defence spending are much lower than for civilian public investment projects.

When you say Europe needs more investment, what kind of investment are you talking about? What is holding it back, and how could Europe unlock it?

The first distinction is the most basic one, between public investment and private investment. Public investment is much smaller, but it is important because, if it is done intelligently, it can drive private investment. We are no longer in the bad old days after the euro crisis when public investment was very depressed. Things have improved slightly, but still not enough to really move the dial.

Business investment is much bigger, so we also have to think about what gives the private sector an incentive to invest. The message we are getting is that there is a heavy regulatory burden and, if we cast that off, companies will invest. I don’t think that is going to happen.

What is holding back investment in the short term? Energy prices are a huge problem. The breakdown of trading relations is another. We also have a genuine competitiveness issue, which is with China.

But what I think is less well discussed is the internal situation, particularly internal demand. Investment that expands productive capacity will only happen if entrepreneurs are convinced there will be demand for the additional products. Europe’s population is now hardly growing at all and is set to shrink, so that is another structural factor holding companies back from investing. We are unfortunately getting locked into a pessimistic, self-reinforcing cycle. That is why the public sector can sometimes kick-start a more virtuous circle and get us out of a vicious one; public investment “crowds in” private investment.

Another factor is regulatory uncertainty. Look at the constant debates in the automobile sector about whether, from 2035, petrol and diesel engines are going to be allowed or not – backwards and forwards. That sort of uncertainty is killing investment.

Other issues include the way investment is financed in Europe and the lack of a venture-capital market. So it is not a simple matter where you pull one lever and suddenly get investment.

What is holding back investment in the short term? Energy prices are a huge problem. The breakdown of trading relations is another. We also have a genuine competitiveness issue, which is with China.

We need to do several things. We need a bigger role for the public sector at the national level, and major European initiatives on the green transition, technology, and infrastructure. We also need investment in schools, hospitals and care services, in addition to classical infrastructure, grids, and interconnections between countries. In technology, we need to build up our own indigenous tech sectors. That is where we really need investment.

We also need more regulatory certainty and, in some cases, support for companies. If European industries need protection from aggressive Chinese competition based on excessive subsidisation, then I would support that. I am not a China basher, but we do need to protect our industries where those distortions exist. And this is where I think we need to see the different orders of magnitude. The whole political system, the media, and the Brussels bubble are investing so much time and energy in the deregulation agenda, which is of more marginal importance.

Even if regulatory simplification is successful on its own terms, I don’t really think anybody believes – and I certainly don’t believe – that it is going to deliver the scale of investment Europe needs. It might reduce some costs, but it is not going to move the dial.

The main point of the Draghi report was that we need around 750-800 billion euros a year in additional investment. Even if we got half of that, it would make a big difference if it were done effectively, in the right places, and in the right sectors. How is regulatory simplification going to deliver that investment? I don’t think it will.

The EU’s growing focus on competitiveness, strategic autonomy, and security is arguably putting its social agenda at risk. Do you see these agendas as compatible? And is it still realistic to think of Social Europe as a structuring political project in this new context?

There are certainly political forces using the competitiveness argument to make Europe less social and to weaken it. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

Let me say a few words about competitiveness. If you use the word in a businesslike sense, Europe is competitive. We have had a current-account surplus for many years. We have no problem paying our way in the world. So this chain of thought that goes, “Europe is not competitive, therefore we have to cut pensions, cut childcare allowances, or make people work longer hours” just doesn’t fly from a very basic point of view.

The more useful understanding of competitiveness – the one Draghi and most sensible economists use – is really about productivity. We should not get obsessed with the idea that a country is like a company, because it isn’t. Competitiveness is about productivity, living standards, and what we can afford as societies. If we don’t have productivity growth, the cake is not growing. And if the cake is not growing, we will have distributional conflicts that are very difficult to resolve.

I very much believe the labour movement and trade unions need to play a role in the debate about how to raise productivity, and many of them do. We have evidence in our research that when you involve workers in decision-making – through work councils, at board level, through collective bargaining, or at sectoral and national level – you get better outcomes. It is not hard to understand why. If you involve people in processes of structural change, for example restructuring or the green transition, the outcomes will be better. There will be less resistance and less conflict, and productivity can grow faster. That is one example of how a sensible competitiveness or productivity agenda goes hand in hand with good social policy.

There are numerous other examples. Think about childcare, education, and healthcare. It is perhaps an instrumental way to think about these things, but from an economic perspective they also affect how productive workers are, how often they can go to work, how much work they miss because they are ill, and how productive they are when they are working.

One of the main ways the competitiveness agenda is manifesting in this mandate is through the simplification-deregulation agenda. What risks do you see this creating for Social Europe, workers’ rights, and labour protections? And how should trade unions respond?

I think we can have a debate about simplification in some cases, but deregulation should be out of the question. That is essentially also the line the trade unions take. We have sectoral bodies and interprofessional bodies where business and labour are represented and can work through the issues that make regulation unnecessarily complex. European Parliament committees can do that as well. That is all fine.

What concerns the trade unions, and us at the ETUI, is the speed with which these things are now being pushed through. There can be over-regulation, or cases where the same thing is covered by two different directives. Nobody wants things to be more complicated than they have to be. But we need to understand that regulation was put there for a purpose.

We can have a debate about simplification in some cases, but deregulation should be out of the question. That is essentially also the line the trade unions take.

It could be that that purpose no longer exists. For instance, we do not need a regulation for steam trains if we no longer have steam trains. Some regulations simply become obsolete. But usually the public purpose is still there, whether it is health and safety, or protecting the environment, workers, or pregnant women. So if you want to weaken or remove a regulation, you need to answer the question: what about that public purpose? How is it still going to be achieved?

Unfortunately, I don’t think we are really having that detailed debate at the moment. It would have to be a very granular, detailed, and time-consuming debate, and instead these things are being pushed through the institutions very quickly. It also makes no sense to talk about regulation simply in quantitative terms. Business lobbies champion ideas like “one in, one out”: every time you introduce one regulation, you have to throw out an old one. That is absurd.

The question should be: what public priorities do we want that the market will not provide without regulation? And then, of course, we can discuss how we achieve those objectives without imposing unnecessarily high costs.

Europe is again talking about strategic industries and reindustrialisation – areas in which trade unions historically played an important role, both in industrial development and in shaping workers’ rights. At a time when collective-bargaining coverage has declined considerably, what might this renewed industrial agenda mean for trade unions and their capacity for renewal and mobilisation?

Following the Covid-19 pandemic and the energy shocks and highly politicised trade relations of recent years, we are simply in a different world. In this context, the renewed focus on industry is welcome, but we should not take it too far because most European workers are in services. That said, industry still has an outsized economic importance. It matters for exports, it is often where productivity growth is generated, and a lot of service employment is built around the industrial sector. It also has strategic significance, including in relation to defence.

For trade unions, industry matters because it is a big part of their history and, in many countries, where they remain relatively strong. Large workplaces are easier to organise than many fragmented service-sector workplaces, and practices of industrial relations have developed over decades – even centuries to some extent – in which trade unions have a recognised voice at the table. You have national and European works councils as well as board-level representation. Union density tends to be higher than in services, although the public sector is of course now extremely important for the trade-union movement as well.

The unions want to play a role in this new industrial-policy debate, and we as a research institute want to support that. This is also closely linked to trade and China. I said before that Europe does not really have a classical competitiveness problem except vis-à-vis China. We have a very large trade deficit with China – roughly one billion euros a day, or around 360 billion euros in 2025. Germany, for instance, had trade surpluses with China for many years but now also runs deficits.

That is partly linked to Chinese policies which, in my view, need to change. China needs to import more and address over-subsidisation in some industries, such as the car industry. It needs to pay its workers more or revalue the currency. There are lots of different steps it could take, and Europe should be negotiating with China about them. But I do not want to bash China. China is also very important for the green transition. I am fine with cheap solar panels coming in and, to some extent, cheaper cars. But we also need a chance to export. That is what trade is for: countries import things others are good at producing and export things they themselves are good at producing, and everybody benefits. But China deliberately restricts imports.

We have been losing manufacturing employment. We lost around 220,000 manufacturing jobs between the average of 2024 and 2025. That is a lot, and that can’t continue.

At the same time, we do not want Fortress Europe. We do not want to stop the green technologies we need from coming in. What has changed is the naïve faith that was dominant in Brussels for decades that we simply need free trade, and everything will be fine. That is gone, and that also creates opportunities for trade unions.

Unions are worried about forced labour, deforestation and the oppression of organised labour in some of our trading partners. They want to use trade as a lever to improve conditions in other countries. That has become more possible, and I think that is an important development.

There has long been a wider debate about the limits of GDP as a measure of economic and social progress, including whether it adequately captures dimensions such as wellbeing, care, and ecological sustainability. Given your point about how the economic “cake” is distributed, how should we think about growth and productivity in an era of extreme wealth concentration and weak redistribution?

Let me split that into two things and first focus on the beyond-GDP question.

We have a long tradition at the institute of work on just transition, and I intend to continue that. Growth is not the solution to everything. What we need, I think, is qualitative growth and investment-driven growth, because that is also a path to decarbonisation. It is easy to become depressed about the climate crisis, but if we have a hope, I do think technology is an important part of it. Technology comes through scientific processes and research, but it only changes economic outcomes if it is actually invested in and becomes part of the capital stock of the economy.

So I am not a “go-for-growth” person in a traditional sense. But I am also very clear that I am not in the degrowth camp. Whether we like it or not, if the cake is not growing, distributional conflicts build up. Politics becomes poisonous: it is you against me; either you have it or I do. If we want decent pensions and we want to take care of elderly people with a shrinking labour force, we need productivity growth and some economic growth.

But the distribution question is absolutely central. Think about comparisons between the United States and European countries. Even if GDP per capita in the United States is higher, people work longer hours and have shorter holidays, and income is much more unequally distributed. So, the benefit for the average person – or, more precisely, the median citizen or median worker – can look very different. How GDP is distributed is therefore absolutely vital.

Whether we like it or not, if the cake is not growing, distributional conflicts build up. Politics becomes poisonous: it is you against me; either you have it or I do.

We are seeing rising concentrations of wealth and income within the corporate sector, more in the US than Europe, but increasingly here too. That is not only an economic problem; it is a political problem. People with enormous amounts of money have outsized political influence. Europe has stricter rules around party financing than the United States, but wealthy people still have influence. They buy newspaper publishers, for example.

Digital services and technology also tend towards monopoly, and wherever you have a monopoly you tend to get concentrations of wealth. That is bad socially, but it can also be bad economically.

And that brings us to AI. If AI improves productivity and those gains are distributed through the economy, then it can be a very good thing. We become more productive, living standards rise, and maybe some boring tasks that people do not like doing can be done by AI. If the gains are shared, people have higher wages and use that income to buy other services, and you can maintain full employment. That is more or less how the positive scenario works.

But that won’t happen if the gains from AI become concentrated among a handful of billionaires or trillionaires, some tech workers, and shareholders. In that case, aggregate demand breaks down, you do not get the corresponding expansion in other services, and you can expect unemployment and social strife.

There is also a more specific labour-market issue beginning to emerge. It looks as if AI may be hitting entry-level jobs – not only in coding, but office positions, skilled jobs, and some professional occupations. Some studies point to this outcome, and there is evidence that fears around AI are quite concentrated among people who are just starting their careers. At the same time, those who already know the ropes may benefit from AI. They can use it to become more productive and perhaps increase their earnings.

So, once again, the question is about distribution: who benefits from the technology and who carries the costs?

Earlier you touched on the challenges posed by Europe’s changing demographics. While ageing societies and shrinking workforces are usually framed as a crisis, tighter labour markets could actually also give workers greater bargaining power, perhaps even strengthen collective bargaining. How do you see those two sides playing out, both now and in the future?

There is a joke going around about a young person who goes to a job interview. At the end, instead of the employer saying, “We’ll call you,” the candidate says: “I’ll put you on my shortlist.” It is a joke, but for certain sectors and skills there is something to it. People can afford to be a bit more choosy. For teachers and healthcare workers, for example, large cohorts are leaving, and employers need people. The same applies to some parts of industry.

This can be good for job quality as well. Even in countries we think of as having high standards, there are sectors – notably care – where working conditions are pretty bad: low pay, long hours, and physically demanding work. We are already seeing that employers who want to keep people in these sectors or attract new workers have to pay higher wages and offer more flexible arrangements, including working hours that make it easier for people with caring responsibilities to remain in the labour market. So, tighter labour markets can also bring positive changes.

We are still relatively early in this EU mandate, and political agendas are likely to evolve over the coming years. Looking ahead to the next few years, what do you think is likely to happen? What would success for Social Europe look like from the ETUI’s perspective? What concerns you most, and where do you see reasons for optimism?

We have to get through some short-term issues first, and they are going to be decisive. If geopolitical conflicts drag on or relations between the major powers deteriorate further, things are going to get very hard. We already face big challenges, and I don’t think we should be under any illusions about that.

We have done some scenario analysis that actually looks beyond five years, towards 2040. Even some of the “muddling through” scenarios for Europe and Social Europe, to be very frank, do not look great. So we need to do things. We cannot simply continue with the status quo.

In that sense, I think Draghi did us a service, even though I don’t agree with everything in his report. He essentially said: look, if we don’t get our act together and move beyond the status quo and the constant “I can’t agree to this, I can’t agree to that,” the outlook is not good. We need some kind of social pact: agreements between member states with different views, between capital and labour, and across political divides.

Maybe it sounds slightly naïve, but people need to recognise that things can get worse and find ways of overcoming some of their differences and making concrete proposals for moving forward. Because if we don’t, things will go downhill. I do think there is scope for a more positive scenario. If we get some tailwinds at the global level and international tensions decline, some of the pressure around huge increases in defence spending could ease.

Technology is another source of optimism. Look at how dramatically the price of solar panels and batteries has declined. I think the price of electric vehicles will also come down considerably. If AI is managed well and fulfils its expectations, I think it can be a force for good. It may not be, but it can be. Higher productivity growth could help us address some fiscal problems and some of the problems connected with demographics.

There are avenues forward. But to be frank, most of them require a stronger European level. Unless we get something like what we had with NextGenerationEU – some sort of central capacity to invest in our common future – it is going to be hard. We need to face up to the fact that even quite large European countries are small on a global scale, and they are becoming smaller in terms of their share of global GDP and their political influence. We need to overcome that fragmentation.

We have seen some positive signs of that happening, but also some limits. We are pushing up against those limits now with the idea of a common European fund or a bigger EU budget. There is a lot of resistance, but we need to overcome it.

So, I am always cautiously optimistic. There is the famous Gramsci quote, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. That is certainly a sort of motto for me personally and, I think, for the institute. We need to do what we can. We need to point things out, make proposals and hope they are picked up by trade unions, political parties, opinion-makers and the media. That is what we do. That is the game we play every day. And it is the game we are trying to win.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. Some answers have been reordered thematically.