New contestations or an alliance of climate obstruction? Understanding the populism/anti-populism divide in climate politics

Far-right populism is regularly blamed for the inability of late modern societies to properly address climate change. E.g. Lockwood (2018) argues that narratives of conspiracy, denial and skepticism prevail since climate policy and science are framed as part of corrupt cosmopolitan elites by the far right. Consequently, an anti-populist alliance of party and movement actors has emerged in the political center and left that advocates to ‘follow the science’ and moralizes against the irrationality of far-right refusals of a climate scientific and international political consensus. A new line of conflict seems to have formed along the populism-antipopulism divide in climate politics (Marquardt/Lederer 2022). Considering the populist heritages of environmentalism, this anti-populist strategy is puzzling. Asking the question how this anti-populist alliance emerged during the mainstreaming and normalization of the fourth wave of the far right, I seek to contest this simplistic anti-populist account by further elaborating on the added value of the concept of anti-populism (Stavrakakis 2014) in environmental political theory (Selk/Kemmerzell 2021; Meyer 2023). Highlighting that parts of the anti-populist alliance itself pursue populist strategies to prevent but also to push promising climate politics, I advocate for a nuanced evaluation of anti-populism. Ultimately, however, I argue that the anti-populist alliance qua anti-populism un/intentionally contributes to climate obstruction by depoliticizing climate politics, which finds social resonance far beyond the far right and its electorate (Blühdorn/Butzlaff 2019). In times of ongoing individualization, flexibilization and precarization, the concept of anti-populism is, therefore, beneficial to understand how the unsustainable is sustained.