New in-depth data research from five leading climate and environment organisations reveals that only a minority of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) during the 2019-2024 mandate acted to protect Europe’s climate, nature and air quality.

BirdLife Europe, Climate Action Network Europe, European Environmental Bureau, Transport & Environment, and WWF European Policy Office have analysed European Parliament voting records of the last five years to provide citizens with an interactive overview that scores all the national political parties and European Parliamentary Groups based on their voting performance.

The EU Parliament Scoreboard looks at the individual voting behaviour of every MEP during the 2019-2024 legislative term and scores them against the voting recommendations of the five European environmental organisations. This provides a measure of each MEPs commitment to environmental sustainability – with the result being a score out of 100. The results are aggregated in the scoreboard for political groups and national parties represented in the European Parliament.

The scoring assesses voting behaviour across 30 policy files, comprising key climate, energy and environmental legislation. 12 policy files focused on a climate-neutral and socially just transition, 8 focused on a nature-positive Europe, and 10 focused on the circular economy and achieving zero pollution.

The Greens/European Green Alliance achieved the best result with 92 points, followed by the Left with 84 points, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats with 70 points, and the Liberals (Renew Europe) with 56 points. Much worse scorers were the centre-right European People’s Party (25 points), the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (10 points) and finally the far-right Identity and Democracy (6 points). With the exception of the far-right, all party groups had MEPs who scored much higher than their party group as a whole. Among the Hungarian parties, the Democratic Coalition scored 70 points, the same as its party group, Momentum 60 points, Jobbik-Conservatives 55 points, and the Community of Hope (István Újhelyi) 52 points. The Christian Democratic People’s Party (17 points) was far behind them, while Fidesz, with its 7 points, only surpassed the “performance” of the far-right party group by one point.

Zoltán Pogátsa, Board Member of the Clean Air Action Group, said: “The European Commission has carried out detailed impact assessments for these laws, and the assessments have in all cases shown that their adoption would benefit the economies of the Member States. This proves that those who sought to block or water down these laws favoured the interests of certain economic groups over the interests of society as a whole.”

András Lukács, President of Clean Air Action Group, added: “The analysis of NGOs will help us decide who to vote for in the European Parliament elections if we want to avoid total collapse.”

The interactive European Parliament scoreboard compiled by NGOs is available here.

More information on the scoreboard, including key conclusions, country analysis and methodology is available here.

The methodology and the full list of policy files and votes analysed are available here.