Terry Reintke: EU's Green Deal can be saved despite setbacks

Polls suggest Europe's Greens are a long way from repeating their successes of the 2019 election, facing the possibility of losing up to 20 seats. 

Euronews' Brussels correspondent Grégoire Lory caught up with the Green's co-lead candidate, Terry Reintke, to discuss the current campaign and the challenges facing the ecological movement. He began by asking her about apparent voter disenchantment with the EU's Green Deal and farmers' outright opposition to it.  

"As green social justice is really at the centre of our political programme, so we want to make sure that any kind of climate measures are also going to be balanced out with, for example, supporting citizens in this transition," Reintke said

"The problems that they [farmers] have do not come from the Green Deal. The problems that they have is that basically with the agricultural model that we have today and also the agricultural policies, of the European Union, with the with the subsidies being distributed in the way they are, they are not having the income that they deserve."

"And for many of them, not the income that they actually need in order to live of what they are doing. So what we want to do is to make agriculture a key issue also in this election campaign, and to say the agricultural policy of the European Union has gone into a wrong direction in the past. Yes, we need to reform it, and we need to make sure that farmers and especially small farmers, get the support that they need."  

In order to advance the transition to a green economy and counter challenges from China in clean energy technologies the Greens are proposing an annual investment of €200 billion in the sector. 

"I can tell you one thing. I think if we don't invest now, and we have seen this