1. France

At the end of April, incumbent President Emmanuel Macron overtook far-Right Marine Le Pen with 58.5% of the vote, becoming France’s first President to win re-election in two decades. Macron ran counter to Le Pen on countless issues, including her abhorrent xenophobic and Islamophobic discourse, but most notably, on climate policy.

While France’s economy was the top concern among French voters, climate change remained a key issue. Le Pen’s strategy rested on a decidedly anti-climate energy agenda. She ran as a candidate in favor of more fossil fuels and against France’s continued participation in NATO and its leadership against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In contrast, President Macron campaigned as a strong centrist climate candidate, vowing to make France a “great environmental nation,” who was unabashedly pro-nuclear. In fact, he launched his campaign with a speech about rebuilding France’s leadership in civilian nuclear power to address climate change and provide clean electricity to Europe. Just two weeks after the election, we met with senior French government officials in Washington to explore how the US and France could work together to accelerate clean energy deployment.

While Marcon won his re-election bid and quelled France’s far-right movement, for now, his strongest supporters were still elderly, more affluent voters, despite his best intentions to engage with a wider spectrum. France’s election is a big win to maintain European climate and clean energy momentum, but it may only be temporary if it doesn’t bring stability to energy supply and prices quickly

2. Australia

For years, Australia returned the climate-denying conservative party to power despite devastating bushfires, scorching heat, and increasingly severe global warming-induced natural disasters. In May 2022, centrist Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese ended this streak, getting elected the country’s new Prime Minister.

Leader of the Labor Party since 2019, Albanese carefully crafted a partnership between green and blue-collar voters based on a pragmatic climate and clean energy agenda. For the first time polling ahead of the election found that climate change was the top issue for Australians, followed closely by the high cost of living.

Australia’s previous Prime Minister, the Conservative Party’s Scott Morrison, was a significant obstacle to clean energy, including even nuclear power. Famously brandishing a chunk of coal in Parliamentary chambers to signal his support for the fossil fuel industry, Morrison saw his political success tied to maintaining the status quo of Australia’s reliance on coal and natural gas.

Where Morrison saw job loss, Albanese saw opportunities. He ran a campaign that, much like President Biden, championed both clean jobs and a rebounding manufacturing sector, earning the support of some fossil fuel workers who remain hesitant about a clean energy transition.

3. United Kingdom​​​​​

Earlier this month, the UK’s local elections closed with a host of victories for the left-leaning Labour Party, with over 500 seats overturned from the Conservative Party. It comes after Sir Keir Starmer displaced scandal-riddled Jeremy Corbyn as the new Labour Party leader. Labour now backs an every-clean-energy approach to the UK decarbonizing, including use of carbon capture, hydrogen, and nuclear.

Starmer’s ascendancy to Labour leader makes the UK unique on this list, as both parties now support ambitious action on clean energy, including the use of every clean energy technology and innovation to get to net-zero. Conservative Prime Boris Johnson’s energy plan includes fast-tracking of renewables, construction of many more nuclear plants, and scaling hydrogen, although it is coupled with incentives for fossil fuels to help address a mounting energy price crisis in the country.

 4. Germany

As Angela Merkel ended her 16-year tenure this past December, Germany elected center-left Olaf Scholz as its new Chancellor, ushering the first Social Democratic government since 2005.

Scholz campaigned on basic economic policies–a stable pension system, a €12 minimum wage, child allowances, and affordable housing. His strategy weighed heavily on cross-party cooperation, uniting the nation’s liberal parties, the Green and Free Democrats Party, with his own to form a traffic-light coalition. With Green Party member Robert Habeck at the helm as his future Vice-Chancellor, Scholz leveraged the momentum of the late 2021 summer flooding to push his intentions to “halt man-made climate change” while simultaneously modernizing Germany’s industrial sector.

The success of Scholz’s electoral strategy lay in his ability to navigate across this newly formed traffic-light coalition. He rallied a broad coalition of voters by appealing to the economically minded Social Democrats, the pro-business Free Democrats, and the environmentally-conscious Green Party members. However, Scholz’s overcommitment across diverse interests was met with hesitancy, particularly from some climate and clean energy advocates. Germany now must eliminate its reliance on Russian natural gas and rapidly expand electrification while simultaneously shutting down its zero-carbon nuclear plants. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this strategy was untenable, as Germany found itself addicted to Russian gas and its own, dwindling coal supply, to replace firm, nuclear power. While Scholz held off serious challenges from the far Right and Left, he has a tremendous amount of work ahead of him to get Germany to walk its clean energy talk.