Climate ambition under competitive resilience: Green Deal contestation in the post-2024 European Parliament

This article examines how the European Green Deal is publicly contested in the European Parliament after the 2024 elections. It argues that, within the July 2024–April 2026 corpus, Green Deal legitimacy is defended, corrected or challenged through a framing configuration that links climate ambition to competitiveness, industrial capacity, energy security, regulatory correction and social acceptability. Competitive resilience denotes a post-crisis mode of legitimation in which environmental ambition is evaluated together with competitiveness, industrial capacity, energy security, regulatory correction and social acceptability. Empirically, the article analyses plenary speeches from the European Parliament’s Compte rendu in extenso (CRE), or verbatim reports of proceedings, between July 2024 and April 2026. The method combines dictionary-assisted framing analysis with expert-assisted qualitative recoding of contestation frames across political groups. The findings show that energy-security reframing and reformist competitiveness dominate the corpus, while critical revisionism is concentrated among right-wing and sovereigntist groups and social-just-transition framing is strongest among the left. The article contributes to debates on parliamentary opposition and EU climate governance by showing that post-2024 Green Deal politics involves a structured re-legitimation of climate policy through the language of European political economy.