For people who care about the fate of the planet (and humanity), it’s easy to feel hopeless right now. Another summer of record-breaking temperatures around the world show the effects of a changing climate aren’t letting up. Meanwhile, much of the progress made toward addressing the crisis in the US and other countries in recent years seems to be in danger. With far-right politics and parties rising around the world, we risk losing precious time in the fight to keep the future livable.

But maybe not everything is as hopeless as it seems.

To be sure, the political right has made very real gains recently in Europe and Latin America, while in the United States a weakened and disorganized Democratic Party appears poised to forfeit the presidency to climate change denier Donald Trump this November. However, a couple of recent elections in major European countries belie the idea that the world faces an inevitable slide to stymied climate action.

In a major political upset from France, Monday saw a coalition of left-wing parties called the New Popular Front come out on top in the country’s parliamentary elections. The right-wing National Rally party, which had been expected to surge in the polls and perhaps even win an outright majority, dramatically underperformed, coming in third behind the Popular Front and President Macron’s coalition of centrists. Considering National Rally leaders have called on France to abandon Europe’s Green Deal, this unexpected result is good news indeed for the climate.

In contrast to the National Rally, the Popular Front supports making France carbon neutral by 2050 and building up clean energy as part of a broader program of public investment. And while France’s own emissions aren’t huge to begin with–the country account for 0.8% of global emissions last year–the nation plays an outsize role in European Union politics. A climate progressive France makes the EU as a whole significantly more likely to follow through on its goals for reducing carbon emissions.

This positive development from France comes just days after Britain’s Conservative Party, which has governed the party for fourteen years, also saw a massive defeat. On July 4, the Labour Party swept into power in Britain, promising (among other things) to put an end to years of climate obstructionism under the Conservatives. Under the previous prime minister, Rishi Sunak, the UK earned the dubious distinction of being one of the few industrialized countries to significantly backslide on its climate commitments in recent years. Labour is committed to, among other things, decarbonizing the power sector by 2030 (friendly note to UK Labour leaders: real carbon neutrality means not including forest biomass).

The UK’s contribution to climate change is about the same as France’s, amounting to 0.79% of global emissions. When it comes to reserves of underground fossil fuels, though, the country is a major power player. The IEA estimates Britain’s proven oil reserves at 1.5 billion barrels. This means if Labour’s climate commitments extend to keeping the country’s fossil fuels in the ground, it could make a real difference to the amount of oil flowing onto the global market.

In countries like France and the UK, a growing a sense that the far-right is the enemy of democracy and progress on issues like climate change seems to have contributed to a willingness among voters to put other differences aside and band together to keep beat back the existential threat posed by right-wing politics. Could a similar sentiment spur US voters to defy the polls and hand Trump a defeat in November?

We’ll find out in less than four months.

Photo credit: Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz