A missed opportunity? How the energetic crisis took over the climate crisis in the 2022 electoral campaign in Italy

The environmental issue had a peculiar trajectory in the Italian political system. If at the end of the 80s environmental issues and environmentalist social movements gained relevance in the country, the green parties have always been marginal. Overall, attention to environmental issues was especially expressed by social movements activists and environmental associations. However, in recent years we have witnessed a growing awareness of the climate change issue. Consequently, ecological issues started again to draw some political attention in Italy too, with the creation of a Ministry of the Ecological Transition and the approval of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan – mostly focused on green transition – in 2021. Therefore, following the increase of the public awareness of the issue, we could hypothesise that Italian parties devoted more attention to environmental issues, in particular to climate change and environmental or green transition, in the campaign for the latest general elections (September 2022). On the contrary, mass media and independent think tanks denounced the absence of climate change issues in the electoral campaign. The consequences of the war in Ukraine, especially regarding energy, monopolised public debate. The aim of this contribution is to analyse the 2022 electoral campaign and to understand the saliency and framing of environmental issues in parties’ discourses. Using the Critical Discourse Analysis approach, party manifestos, Facebook posts and electoral debates have been coded, with a focus on environmental and energy issues. The relatively low salience of climate change issues is explained both with endogenous and exogenous factors. The endogenous reason is the lack of political entrepreneurs willing and able to activate an environmental cleavage in the country. The exogenous one is the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and the subsequent energetic crisis.