EU ‘must’ shift to renewables to end fossil fuel ‘blackmail from war-driving authoritarian regimes’

François Picard is pleased to welcome Hannah Neumann, German MEP, Greens/EFA and Chair of EU Parliament’s Delegation for Iran. She offers analysis on the growing geopolitical instability surrounding Iran, energy security, and the European Union’s strategic position in an increasingly unstable fragmented global order. From her perspective as a Member of the European Parliament and Chair of the Delegation for Iran, the central issue is not merely the volatility of negotiations, but their lack of clarity and coherence. From her vantage point, “the main problem is that they don’t even have a clear focus on what they are negotiating about”. She argues that current diplomatic efforts suffer from an absence of defined objectives, concerning nuclear policy, maritime security in the Strait of Hormuz, or broader regime-related questions. At the same time, she emphasizes a critical blind spot: the systematic exclusion of Iranian civil society from international discourse, exacerbated by digital repression. She places Europe’s vulnerability within its structural dependence on fossil fuels, which exposes it to geopolitical coercion. The wars in the Middle East and Ukraine “show how interconnected these different conflicts are and how absurd the situation is”. Case in point: as the EU has reached a solution with Hungary to offer a 90 billion euro lifeline to Ukraine, the oil flowing through the Druzhba pipeline also “supports the Russian war economy”. She contends that true political autonomy for the European Union can only emerge through a decisive transition to renewable energy: In the meantime, “these war-driving authoritarian regimes can basically blackmail us with their fossil energy”.