Left-wing populism and ‘popular environmentalism’: a comparative analysis of the French (LFI), German (Die Linke), and Spanish (Podemos) cases

In Europe, the rise of populist parties and the growing importance of climate issues on the public agenda are increasingly well documented in the academic field, although most often analysed separately. Recent work has sought to analyse the possible interactions between them. However, most of this work focuses on populist radical right parties (PRRP). By contrast, and in order to provide new insights into the linkages between populist discourse and environmentalism, this paper focuses on populist radical left parties (PRLP). I propose a comparative analysis of three European political parties (I focus on leaders and activists): Die Linke (The Left) in Germany, La France insoumise (Unbowed France, LFI) in France, and Podemos (We Can) in Spain. This paper situates the discourses of these organisations within the national contexts in which they evolve and will seek to meet two objectives: (a) understanding how left-wing populist parties address environmental issues; (b) analysing to what extent the environmental narrative of these parties framed in populist terms is. I rely on a corpus of quantitative and qualitative data, and follow a mixed-method approach involving : (1) a lexicometrical analysis of the leaders/activists speeches (performed with Iramuteq [leaders] and NVivo [activists]) to measure the articulation between populism and environmentalism; (2) a qualitative content analysis involving a socio-historical approach to understand the discourses in light of the context in which it was expressed. To address the first objective, I focus on the ‘greening’ process of radical left parties and how, in this process, they have developed a narrative that differs from that of green parties in order to present themselves as the true ecological forces in their countries (e.g. by emphasising a ‘popular environmentalism’ that links environmental issues to socio-economic issues). The second objective allows raising the question of the relevance of the concept of ‘environmental populism’, and raises the question of the respective roles of populism as such and its host ideology in framing environmental issues, linked with recent research in the field of populism studies that has specifically called for a better distinction between populism and ‘what it travels with’ (Hunger and Paxton 2021). I focus on PRLPs’ environmental discourses that oppose ‘those at the bottom’ (the people, victims of air pollution, pesticides, junk food) to ‘those at the top’ (the elite responsible for pollution, the ‘unscrupulous billionaires who dream of making space their new playground’). This comparative analysis provides the basis for a first theoretical framework for understanding the left-wing populism/environmentalism articulation at a time when, in Europe, some parties of the populist left have succeeded in taking power, and others are emerging as major opposition forces in their countries.