Jusqu’ici tout va bien – The European Liberal Forum

Written By: Eloi Borgne, Junior Policy and Research Officer

“Jusqu’ici tout va bien” is French for “so far, so good.” It’s also the refrain from an old saying that the 1995 film La Haine made famous: a man falls from a fifty-storey building, and on the way down he reassures himself, floor by floor, that everything is fine. The joke is in the landing: it was never the fall that mattered. A year ago, in “All quiet on the climate front,” I argued that Europe was treating the climate crisis as a secondary concern while pouring its political energy into defence, as if the two were rivals rather than both essential. Twelve months on, we’re further down the building, and Brussels is still telling itself that, so far, things are fine. 

I’m currently writing this blog in the middle of a heatwave, in the sweltering capital of Europe. Western Europe is melting under its second heat dome in two months, with temperatures spiking above 40°C and heat alerts posted across 26 countries, from Ireland to Greece. Records are being broken by shocking margins. Europe remains the world’s fastest-warming continent, heating at roughly twice the speed of the global average since the 1980s. And per the World Health Organisation, heat has caused over 200,000 deaths across Europe in the last four years, almost all of them preventable. 

This is the backdrop against which, a week before the heat dome arrived, the European Parliament voted through the bloc’s toughest migration law in decades. As the result was announced, MEPs from the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the European Conservatives and Reformists, and the far-right Patriots for Europe stood and chanted “send them back.” The new rules allow rejected asylum seekers to be removed to offshore “return hubs,” facilities campaigners have likened to camps, modelled on Italy’s outsourced site in Albania. Whatever one thinks of the policy itself, the contrast is hard to ignore: a chamber with the energy to chant about removing people, and not a word about the much larger movement of people our own inaction is setting in motion. The World Bank’s Groundswell research projects that climate change could force up to 216 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050. That’s displacement on a scale the Return Regulation was never built for, driven by failing harvests and water scarcity rather than persecution. 

It won’t spare Europe either. Between 1980 and 2023, extreme weather caused around 240,000 deaths and roughly €738 billion in economic losses across the continent, a toll that has only grown since I cited similar figures a year ago. The European Environment Agency’s risk assessment found that risks to food and water security are already at critical levels in southern Europe. These aren’t 2050 problems, they’re today’s. 

Retreating when we should be advancing 

On several fronts, we’re moving backwards. France’s 2026 budget cuts the credits behind MaPrimeRénov‘, its flagship home renovation scheme, by €500 million. Belgium has gone further: Flanders has scrapped renovation grants for middle and higher-income households as part of €1.5 billion in budget savings, while Wallonia has cut its renovation premiums by an average of 60%, and Brussels’ Renolution scheme has been left in limbo by a stalled regional government. 

At EU level, the pattern repeats. The Omnibus I package, finalised in February, narrowed sustainability reporting and due diligence rules so far that in-scope companies are no longer required to hold a Paris-aligned climate transition plan at all. Civil society groups have pointed to the EPP’s willingness to align with the far right to push that package through, the same coalition behind the migration vote. The Deforestation Regulation has been postponed again, this time to the end of 2026 for large operators. And ELF’s own analysis of the new farm policy reform has flagged the removal of climate ringfencing as a real risk, even as the policy leans further on outdated, land-based subsidies. 

The limits of adaptation 

France’s response to the heatwave has mostly become a fight about air conditioning. Marine Le Pen has called for a “grand plan clim”, insisting that “air conditioning saves lives,” while figures on the French left such as Jean‑Luc Mélenchon argue that air‑conditioning would ultimately make the problem worse (in the case of mass adoption it could). 

Both are talking past each other. Installing AC where it saves lives, in hospitals, care homes and schools, is the right call, but it’s worth using the correct terms: that’s adaptation, reducing the damage from heat that has already arrived, not mitigation, reducing the emissions that keep causing it. France’s national adaptation plan, the PNACC 3, draws exactly this distinction: mitigation cuts emissions, adaptation reduces the damage already likely to occur.  

The liberal answer is to decarbonise the adaptation itself. That starts with favouring reversible heat pumps over basic AC units: the same box heats homes in winter and cools them in summer, far more efficiently, yet the renovation grants that would help pay for them are exactly what’s being cut in France and Belgium. It continues with the renovation work those grants were meant to fund in the first place, since well-insulated buildings don’t just cut winter heating bills, they stay cooler in summer too. And it means matching the rising electricity demand for cooling with the supply best suited to meet it: UK homes with rooftop solar generated the equivalent of five hours of free air conditioning a day during this very heatwave, because solar output and cooling demand peak at almost the same time. Backing that up with grid storage, and with the faster permitting and emerging technologies, from osmotic energy to solar-powered vehicles, that Renew Europe has pushed for in Parliament, is what a serious liberal climate policy looks like. Not AC instead of decarbonisation. AC powered by it. 

Adaptation is now a necessity in cities 

Cooling is about how the city itself is built, not just what’s going on inside. We need to redesign cities to deal with various weather circumstances, such as heat. In Brussels, activists have been swimming in fountains, to bring attention to the lack of open-air swimming spots in the city. Paris offers a useful, if partial, model. After a century-long ban it has reopened the Seine to public swimming this summer, betting that a clean, well-managed river does more for a hot city than another fountain ever could. Additionally, its’ OASIS programme has been turning 73 hectares of asphalt schoolyards into shaded, planted “cool islands,” open to the public outside school hours, cutting daytime air temperatures by 1 to 3°C and giving the elderly and children somewhere to shelter when the city overheats. The city plans 300 such cool islands by 2030. Although this does replace decarbonisation, trees, shade and somewhere safe to swim are fast and popular ways to make a heatwave survivable while the harder work of cutting emissions catches up. 

This pattern is actually, an opening. The EPP has chosen, more than once now, to borrow a far-right agenda on migration and to quietly hollow out climate ambition alongside it. That leaves a wide, largely empty space in the European centre for a party willing to take both security and the climate seriously, rather than trading one off against the other. The choice between migration enforcement and climate ambition is just as false as the choice between defence and climate I wrote about last year: both compete for political bandwidth, but only one of them is actually fighting the threats we face. ELF has spent years urging liberals to own the future rather than fear it. For me, owning the future starts with the issue we’re most tempted to look away from: climate change. 

We’re still falling from the building. Whether we spend the way down repeating jusqu’ici tout va bien, or use the time we have left to change how we land, is a choice policymakers can still make.