Obstructive anti-populism? Exploring a relational understanding of anti-/populism and climate obstruction

Far-right populism, its climate denial and scepticism are regularly made responsible for the inability of late modern societies to properly address climate change. E.g. Lockwood (2018) argues that narratives of conspiracy, denial and scepticism prevail since far-right populists frame climate policy and science as part of corrupt cosmopolitan elites (see also Huber et al. 2021; Marquart/Lederer 2022). Consequently, an anti-populist alliance of party and movement actors has emerged that advocates to ‘follow the science’, to commit to international climate political agreements and moralizes against the irrationality of far-right refusals of a climate scientific and international political consensus (Zulianello/Ceccobelli 2020). Considering the populist heritages of environmentalism, this anti-populist strategy is puzzling (Buzogány/Mohamad-Klotzbach 2021). Asking the question how this populism/anti-populism divide in discourses on climate change has been constituted during the mainstreaming and normalization of the fourth wave of the far right (Mudde 2019), I seek to contest this simplistic anti-populist account by further exploring the added value of the concept of anti-populism by discursive approaches to populism (Stavrakakis 2014; Moffitt 2018) in research on climate politics (Meyer 2023). Highlighting that parts of the anti-populist alliance itself pursue populist strategies to prevent but also to push climate politics (Selk/Kemmerzell 2021; Swyngedouw 2022), I advocate for a nuanced evaluation of anti-populist strategies. 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. Thus, the concept of a populism/anti-populism divide sheds light on dynamics of depoliticization as well as relational aspects of the construction of populist and anti-populist stances. Highlighting different practices of primary (denial) and secondary (delay) climate obstruction (Ekberg et al. 2023) beyond the far right the concept is, therefore, beneficial to understand climate obstruction. However, it struggles with the integration of tertiary obstruction, i.e. social inaction or inertia (Brulle/Norgaard 2019) in climate politics beyond depoliticization. Since social inertia and its relation to primary and secondary obstruction is key to understand climate obstruction, I advocate for the integration of perspectives on individualization and externalization (Blühdorn/Butzlaff 2019; Lessenich 2019).