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Former Romanian president Basescu was paraphrased as saying in a recent interview that:

The European Green Deal “will definitely create tensions” inside the EU, and risks pushing “two or three countries” to leave the Union altogether. [...]

  • The EU’s current funding proposal for Romania is “ridiculous,” he says. “With €10 billion, it is impossible to close down the coal energy production in our country”.
  • “Our real priorities in Romania is to build infrastructure like motorways” and railways as well as modernising education and the healthcare system.
  • Romania “cannot compromise” these infrastructure projects for the Green Deal because they “are a key element” of the country’s development.
  • Such “discrepancies between EU and national priorities are likely to generate huge tensions inside the EU, which could lead to some countries considering the possibility of leaving the Union altogether.”

What other EU countries besides Romania have expressed similar concerns?

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    Ref. "Romania “cannot compromise” these infrastructure projects for the Green Deal because they “are a key element” of the country’s development." - it is ironic that Romania fails for some years now to use EU "free money" to build a significant portion of a highway. Important notice: Basescu is known for his sense of humor (last paragraph from here: “If you ever want to truly see Romania, don’t use the roads (..) I recommend a helicopter.”
    – Alexei
    Commented Mar 1, 2020 at 19:58

2 Answers 2

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What might be seen as "the usual suspects" of Hungary & Poland also voiced concerns, as well as the Czech Republic. In December, they threatened to block the deal entirely.

Although all four countries seem to accept the threat of global warming, and indeed the need for a reduction of carbon emissions, they objected to the perceived imbalance of the agreement against eastern European countries.

For a start, in their race to catch up industrially with western Europe from their Soviet history, the countries are said to have sacrificed environmental protections, leading to unequal levels of carbon emissions across the EU, and in particular a dependence on coal-fired power stations. This was later mitigated by the EU announcing a 100bn fund to help coal dependent countries transition. Notably, however, this money was not to be used to transition towards nuclear power.

The countries initially objected to the fact that nuclear energy was not going to be a part of the strategy to lower emissions, however this concession by the EU was later made in order to win the support of the Czech Republic & Hungary. The support of Poland was only obtained by negotiating Poland-specific opt-outs to the target of obtaining carbon neutrality by 2050.

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The Netherlands is also voicing some concerns but this is mainly internal.

To meet the requirements for the green deal we reduced our maximum speed to 100, stopped an insane amount of construction projects (which has caused a lot of construction companies to go belly up) and farmers are expected to shut down (whit compensation) or drastically decrease their livestock. This measures have lead to mass protests by farmers, truckers and construction workers with city halls literally being besieged and highways closed.

Another issue is that all new houses being built have to be built green (no gas, heat pumps and so on) but this makes them a lot more expensive in purchase and maintenance, this while we have a affordable housing crisis on our hands.

These protests and housing concerns have made the government a bit more critical on the green deal (even if it's only saving their next election campaign) when it comes to internal politics. But our current government is highly pro-European Union(although they have become slightly more critical) and wants to appease them.

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  • A bit of googling finds politico.eu/article/… for example. In that respect, we can probably assign France's yellow-vest protests at least as ostensibly related to that in some way too (fuel taxes etc.) Commented Mar 2, 2020 at 15:05
  • This answer starts incorrect. The Dutch measures are in response to the existing Natura 2000 requirements, not the proposed EU Green Deal. It's true that the lack of support for existing green policy causes concerns for further geen policies.
    – MSalters
    Commented Mar 3, 2020 at 11:18

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