Framing the Environment: Populist and Conspiratorial Narratives in Radical Right Party Campaigns in Italy and France

Radical Right Parties (RRPs) are frequently portrayed as anti-environmentalists, yet their stance on environmental issues is more complex, spanning from outright climate change skepticism to acknowledgment of anthropogenic climate change. This paper examines the 2022 electoral campaigns of four RRPs in Italy and France to analyze how they framed environmental issues. A distinctive aspect of RRPs’ rhetoric is their anti-establishment stance, which frequently casts experts and institutions as deceptive. This distrust often overlaps with conspiratorial narratives, where scientific data on global warming is dismissed as fabricated to advance hidden agendas. To explore these dynamics, this study employs a mixed-method approach, coding all the posts related to environmental issues from the Parties’ and Leaders’ Facebook official pages. By doing so, it seeks to capture whether and to what extent populist and conspiratorial discourses intersect in their communication. These discourses frequently rely on portraying environmental policies, such as decarbonization or renewable energy transitions, as tools of elite control, detrimental to national sovereignty and economic well-being. This study contributes to the broader understanding of how contemporary RRPs frame environmental issues and integrates perspectives from populism, conspiracism, and environmental politics.