Far-Right Populism, Party-System Fragmentation and Energy and Climate Policy: Will Far-Right Parties Kill or Save the Climate at the End?

The rise of populism and support for far-right parties have considerably reshaped the political and party landscape in Europe over the past years. This has not only affected the policy discourse and agenda setting but has also made the government formation more difficult and contested, often leading to minority governments or broad and heterogeneous coalitions. This paper explores the impact the rise of populism and party-system fragmentation have on national climate and energy discourse, goals and policies. Do we see the trend of major parties moving towards the right spectrum and withdrawing the support for ambitious climate and energy targets? Or do we maybe witness increasingly ambitious climate and energy targets and policies due to a more important strategic role of smaller left-wing parties in coalition building? To address these questions, we analyze and compare the coalition programmes and major decisions on climate and energy issues of the last two governing coalitions across six North-West European countries (Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria). These cases share a similar proportional electoral system and they all have a strong far-right party represented in the parliament. They also provide for a necessary variation in government formation (majority governments with and without far-right party and minority governments with and without far-right party) which allows to study the influence of different government constellations on energy and climate policy. Our preliminary findings show that governments with far-right parties have proved to be equally and sometimes even more ambitious on climate and energy goals. Our findings also show that the parliaments are becoming the key arena for energy and climate policy-making and that in some cases (Norway, Sweden) energy and climate laws are adopted against the will of the minority governments. The paper’s findings hold important lessons for understanding patterns of climate and energy policy-making in times of party-system fragmentation and far-right populism.