Rise Against the ‘Climate Mafia’! Far-Right Climate-Change Communication in the European Parliament

As climate change has become an increasingly public issue, the public’s understanding of this phenomenon and the ways it has been made meaningful have been increasingly analysed. However, while research on, e.g., the conservative right, including US Republicans and conservative newspapers in Europe, exists, few studies have investigated communication about climate change by far-right actors, ranging from ‘radical-right populists’, such as the Danish People’s Party, to extreme-right ones, e.g. the National Democratic Party of Germany. Indeed, while their stance on, e.g., immigration is researched extensively, we know rather little about their climate-change communication – and still less about climate-change communication by the far right in the European Parliament (EP). Thus, this paper provides insights into climate-change communication by far-right actors in the EP by asking questions such as ‘Which stance doe far-right parties in the EP take vis-à-vis climate change?’, ‘Does their climate-change communication relate to their core topics, e.g. rejection of immigration and the European Union?’ and ‘Are there differences in climate change communication within the far-right party family?’. To analyse these questions, I investigate a corpus of more than 400 parliamentary speeches by far-right actors in the EP between 2004 and 2019 (legislative periods 6, 7 and 8). First, a content analysis was performed on these data, determining their acceptance (or not) of the thesis of manmade climate change. Second, dominant themes within their discourse about climate change are carved out (quantitatively) and introduced in a more qualitative manner, pointing to specific functions this communication fulfils within the wider ideology of these actors. On this basis, this paper argues that instead of epistemic scepticism towards (manmade) climate change, these (increasingly professional) actors have largely directed their criticism towards specify policy responses. Indeed, while not all far-right parties are climate-change sceptics, many are, often due to their populism and hostility towards ‘globalism’. That is, because global elites supposedly want, for example to tax ordinary people, ruin national economies and/or dissolve nations. In analysing far-right meaning-making in the EP, this paper thus points to a nexus of borders, climate change and democracy constructed by far-right parties in Europe."