Conference Agenda

European Union (EU) environmental legislative processes are structured by varying types of coalitions. Such coalition types differ in their composition, including the number and type of policy actors that are members of the coalition, the number of shared preferences among coalition members, the coalitions’ resources, and the intensity of intra-coalition coordination. Once formed, these coalitions compete against one another to try and influence policy outcomes in their favor, resulting in policy progress or stalemate. Yet, coalitions do not form in a void but are shaped by the policymaking processes and characteristics of the legislative proposals being negotiated and which they seek to influence. To account for and explain why different types of coalitions form and structure EU environmental legislative processes, this paper asks: during EU environmental legislative processes, under what legislative characteristics do different types of coalitions form?

Drawing on the Advocacy Coalition Framework and EU interest group literature, the article considers four legislative characteristics – salience, complexity, newness, and the addressee scope – to explain how variation in these legislative characteristics influence the formation of different coalition types. Drawing on interviews, policy documents, and specialized press reports, the article uses social network analysis and content analysis to identify coalitions and characterize them in the policymaking processes of the European Climate Law, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, the Renewable Energy directive, the Sustainable Batteries regulation, and the Just Transition Fund. Then, the cross-legislative comparison of the identified coalition types centers on a crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis.

Contemporary European politics is marked by the dual influence of rising Euroscepticism and ambitious climate goals under the European Green Deal (EGD). While Euroscepticism and populism reshape European integration debates, the EGD aims to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, representing a transformative agenda for the EU's economy and energy sector. Our paper explores the interplay between these dynamics, focusing on how Eurosceptic narratives address the EGD within parliamentary debates in Czechia, Poland, and Slovakia. It means countries where Eurosceptic and populist forces have significant influence and where the EGD is a prominent public issue.

Our research applies the Narrative Policy Framework to analyze how policymakers strategically use narratives to support or oppose the EGD, differentiating between hard and soft Eurosceptic perspectives. By combining qualitative and quantitative methods, we examine the distinctions in policy narratives across the selected countries and concrete political parties. The paper also highlights a shift in Euroscepticism from ideological opposition to the EU (period 2015–2020) to a renewed focus on economic concerns, as exemplified by debates surrounding the EGD’s impact on national economies and the single market.

Our paper contributes to a nuanced understanding of Eurosceptic narratives, revealing variations in ideological perspectives and strategic approaches across Central European political parties. It also underscores the role of narratives in shaping public discourse, influencing policy decisions, and addressing the evolving tensions between European integration and domestic political agendas.

Recent media reports and assessments of EU institutions indicate that Bulgaria has struggled to meet the decarbonization goals set out by the EU. This inertia of the country’s coal-based political-economic regime – or carbon lock-in, as referred to by Seto et al. (2016) – is intriguing and worth exploring: one would expect that as one of the latest arrivals to the EU and the poorest member state, Bulgaria will seek to take the maximum advantage of EU resources available for energy transition.

This paper aims to account for the slow pace of Bulgaria’s decarbonization. Building on the Jessopian theory of state and recent scholarship on electoral risks related to greening policies, it shows that Bulgaria’s carbon lock-in is the result of both institutional factors and actors’ agency. The coal-based regime persists thanks to the continued involvement of the Bulgarian state, which has actively subsidized coal mines and coal-fired power plants, generated discourses in their support and granted privileged access to social actors representing the sector. The brown status quo has remained unchallenged by the country’s political actors as the exceptionally high frequency of electoral contests has discouraged them from pursuing bold and potentially unpopular reforms. Political actors’ idleness and administrative inaction have further boosted the determination of pro-coal social forces to defy the decarbonization agenda, resulting in considerable delays – and sometimes even reversals – of the coal exit process.

The limited progress of decarbonization in other Central-Eastern European (CEE) countries suggest that Bulgaria’s carbon inertia, if extreme, is no exception. Therefore, in addition to green-target-setting, the EU should launch information campaigns tailored for specific national circumstances and accessible to local constituencies. In the absence of a comprehensive communication strategy, green transition and other EDG-related policies will continue to be viewed as the ‘Brussels agenda’, enabling pro-coal social forces across the region to capitalize on transition-related concerns and delay decarbonization efforts. At the same time, the EU should strengthen the capacity of national-level administrations to implement coal phaseout, especially in member states where governance quality has been low. In the absence of such assistance, pro-status quo actors in CEE may continue blocking national-level decarbonization measures, leading to an uneven and unjust energy transition in the EU.

This paper investigates how Party Groups of the European Parliament (EPGs) modulated their discursive and legislative positionality across key policy dimensions of the European Green Deal (EGD). Over the course of the 9^th legislature (2019-2024), the politicisation of the EGD shifted from being highly supportive of policy action to becoming increasingly constraining; simultaneously, its debated policy direction was also reframed towards green industrialisation, strategic autonomy, and enhanced competitiveness. Against this background, EPGS participating in the voting coalition faced a political dilemma: upholding a policy with strong public salience (‘responsibility’) vis-à-vis reacting to the oppositional politicisation of degrading economic conditions (‘responsiveness’). The research investigates the impact of the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the intensifying global competition for the green transition on the party-level support for (and rhetoric around) the EGD. By endorsing a discursive institutionalist framework, it assesses the real extent of ideational change along the ‘responsibility-responsiveness’ dyad; this helps to clarify whether the shifting politicisation was the result of crises-induced shocks to which EPGs were forced to adjust, or also amounted to an endogenous and strategically-driven process. The selection and analysis of EPGs is structured around economic (Left-Right) and cultural (GAL-TAN) cleavages, as well as coalition versus opposition dynamics. Empirically, the study focuses on three core policy dimensions of the EGD – energy transition, eco-social justice, and green growth decoupled from resource use – where ideological competition is most pronounced and shocks expected to have had an impact. First, the research compares EPGs’ manifestos (2019-2024) to detect parties’ ideological fault lines and crucial shifts in the framing of programmatic ideas. Next, a more fine-grained analysis of policy debates (policy framings) and legislative processes (amendments and voting) identifies the strategies of politicisation and evolving positionalities across context and electoral cycle.

As global politics witnesses the rise of populist leaders and parties, the consequences concern several areas of EU policy adaptation, including the European Green Deal. The arguable imposition of common environmental goals is yet another motive for populist factions to frame it within Euroskeptic and climate denialist narratives. Italian and French populist parties (chosen following the PopuList periodical classification) are promoting their stances about climate change science as well as climate change policies in several sites. The present analysis draws on both the literature on the formation of public opinion and the available sources on its present state (such as the surveys conducted by YouGov on lively topics like the environmental policies), selecting a list of keywords and phrases typical of the political debate on the topic. At the core of this work, however, there are these parties’ manifestos (their electoral programs for the 2024 European Elections) and some of their most prominent politicians’ X (Twitter) activity. Are there significant differences between the occurrence of selected keywords and the sentiment orientation between the official manifestos and the communication of the relative leaders? This paper also examines the ways in which these parties appeal to values like moral responsibility and the legitimacy of development, and assesses whether their rhetoric leans toward conspiracy theories or "what-aboutism”. Do these communicative choices relate to the state of public opinion on the Green Deal, gauged in aforementioned European surveys? Answering such questions provides insights on the different ways the EU green policies are discussed and opposed by the most significant populist parties.