The Unravelling of a Success Story: How Politics Is Killing Europe’s Wolves
The EU has long claimed to promote coexistence between wolves and other large carnivores and rural communities. In practice, however, its efforts have focused largely on compensating farmers for livestock losses rather than investing in long-term solutions. This reactive approach has failed and is now being used to justify dismantling one of Europe’s rare conservation successes.
In 2022, when Switzerland sought to downgrade the wolf’s protected status under the Bern Convention, the EU opposed it outright. Citing scientific advice from the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe, Brussels argued the move lacked evidence and would endanger a fragile conservation success.
But two years later, those same arguments were discarded. By late 2023, the European Commission had launched a review, and in 2024 the EU itself proposed the very downgrade it had once dismissed as “scientifically unjustified”. What changed was not the science but the politics: rural depopulation, underfunding, and farmer discontent were amplified by conservative parties into a wider anti-green backlash. Under pressure, the EU abandoned its earlier defence of strict protection and coexistence, and gave way to political concerns.
