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Climate change is heating up elections, and the right if it’s on fire.
Voters in Australia ousted the Liberal-National government of Scott Morrison from power on Saturday in what has been dubbed the country’s “climate election”. High-profile Liberals were pushed out of the party’s inner-city heartland, losing six seats to pro-climate independents and at least one to the Greens.
New Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese flew to Japan on Monday to meet leaders of the Quad – a grouping that includes Australia, India, Japan and the US – with a message: “There is a new government in Australia, and it is a government that represents a change in terms of the way we deal with the world on issues like climate change.”
The role that weather plays in Australian politics is extreme, but not unique. Climate change is emerging as an election issue and other governments are also at risk of being undermined or outflanked on the left by voters who want more far-reaching climate action.
In Germany, the center right was swept sideways by a green wave. The Conservatives who govern Britain are under pressure from climate rebels on the right wing of the party. In France, it is a problem of the center. In America, it looks like Joe Biden will suffer.
That’s why Australia’s election is a warning to “centre-right parties around the world,” said John Flesher, the international spokesman for the UK Conservative Environment Network, a lobby group that aims to promote environmentalism within the Tory party. “Voters of all persuasions want politicians to act decisively to address climate change.”
Down Under, Morrison’s downfall is analyzed more directly.
“They tried to flout their climate policies and they got punished,” said Richie Merzian, a former Australian diplomat who is now director of the climate and energy program at the Australia Institute.
It is the most dramatic example in a series of recent elections in which the weather has played a role.
In Germany in September, the Christian Democrats (CDU) lost their 16-year hold on power to a coalition of Social Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens. Although former Chancellor Angela Merkel had adopted one of the world’s most ambitious net-zero emissions policies, the party’s commitment lost credibility when CDU leader Armin Laschet was filmed laughing during a visit to a city hit by devastating floods on Thursday. last summer and he refused to change the policy amid calls for a stronger response. The Greens rose to third place and were given ministries with a mandate to clean up Germany’s economy.
The CDU’s defeat was not just due to climate change, but “our weak performance” was a factor, said Peter Liese, a CDU Member of the European Parliament. The “recipe for success,” he said, includes stronger climate policy.
Now some CDU figures are pushing for the party to realign and slam the Greens as they struggle to turn their ambitions into policies. “Each party must critically examine its own climate policy goals… This is not only true for the CDU, but also for the Greens,” said Wiebke Winter, a CDU board member and part of its youth wing.
In France last month, incumbent President Emmanuel Macron rushed to draft a new green agenda in the final two weeks of the presidential election campaign after a surprisingly strong challenge from far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who promised climate action. stronger.
Duly re-elected, Macron adopted Mélenchon’s policy of long-term centralized environmental planning and this week swore in a team of ministers tasked with that mission. But Mélenchon still has him under pressure, assembling a coalition of Green and left parties with the explicit aim of denying Macron’s coalition a majority in June’s legislative elections.
In the US, Democrats have dismayed activists on the left for failing to convince one of their own, Senator Joe Manchin, to pass major climate legislation in the Senate. That risks compounding the party’s problems in the November midterm elections, said Evergreen Action executive director Jamal Raad. Biden won the support of young climate-conscious voters in 2020, but now “the fear is that they won’t vote,” Raad said.
flanked
The danger often comes from within.
In Australia, Morrison’s Liberal-National Coalition is divided between a moderate wing and a right-wing faction that has fought even rudimentary attempts to promote policies to cut emissions. The UK Conservatives and Germany’s CDU also have anti-climate lobby groups that aim to stoke voter concerns about rising costs of living with green politics.
That leaves them vulnerable to being outflanked. In the UK, the Tory party has been told by pollsters that climate is a “permission to play” issue in terms of its credibility with voters, prompting Prime Minister Boris Johnson to revisit his past climate skepticism and cast as an evangelist for environmental affairs.
The Conservative Party has a skeptical wing on climate change, which has so far not changed the government’s policy on the issue. But if Johnson bows to pressure from him, Flesher said Australian losses inside Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney could easily be repeated at Surrey, Canterbury or Wimbledon.
“This could happen on the UK’s so-called ‘blue wall’ if the Conservatives water down the bold environmental platform that helped secure a landslide victory for the party in 2019,” he said, referring to southern constituencies that could be vulnerable to Labor or Liberal Democrats. candidates. voting by environmental groups has endorsed that, indicating climate concerns are stronger in Tory strongholds than in the rest of the country.
In Australia, the lessons the Liberal-National Coalition draws from its defeat may determine its electoral future.
Climate politics has been toxic for more than a decade. Morrison is the fifth prime minister to lose his job in the so-called “climate wars”, but the only one to lose it because his efforts were not considered ambitious enough.
In the days since the election, the split within the Climate Coalition has been stark: Liberal moderates have urged the party to return to center, while Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce has said the party could leave. completely your net zero commitment.
That could play into the hands of the “teal” independents (Liberal-blue mixed with a hint of green), who swept the Liberals in this election.
“I am not convinced that drifting further to the right will help [the Coalition] in a constituency like mine,” said Zoe Daniel, the newly elected independent MP for the Goldstein constituency in inner Melbourne, where she said weather was “the main issue for most people.”
Daniel, a former journalist, said she was the kind of “socially progressive, economically conservative” swing voter the Liberals had lost by not acting on the climate.
Fear factor
Just like last year in Germany, climate change played a direct role in Australian politics.
Morrison’s first full term as prime minister was “foreseen by unprecedented bushfires and flooding, both supercharged by climate change,” Merzian said. Morrison had his Laschet moment when he flew to Hawaii during the fires and said in an interview, “‘I don’t hold a hose, man.’
In Brisbane, where flooding has repeatedly submerged the city and surrounding countryside in recent months, the Greens have won two seats and are vying for a third, at least tripling their representation in the lower house of the national parliament.
Seeing climate change in stark reality “has really scared people,” Daniel said. There was a feeling among voters that “time is getting compressed. That you can’t keep thinking, ‘Oh, well, that’s something that’s going to happen in the future.’”
But the teals have tapped into another fear entirely, one that resonates throughout Melbourne’s affluent harbor and Sydney’s millionaire ranks: the fear of a missed opportunity.
“The corporate world is way ahead of the government in action on climate policy,” he said. “I think for a lot of people the penny has dropped that it’s an economic problem and that we really have to move forward on this. Otherwise, our prosperity will be threatened.”
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