EU ETS 2 Under Fire: Far-Right Narratives, Political Contestation, and Carbon Pricing in Central and Eastern Europe

The introduction of EU ETS 2, extending carbon pricing to buildings and road transport, represents one of the most politically salient components of the EU’s decarbonisation framework. Unlike the first phase of the EU ETS, which primarily affected industrial emitters, EU ETS 2 directly influences household energy and mobility costs, thereby heightening its political visibility and contestation. As implementation debates intensify, it is increasingly evident that the perceived legitimacy of ETS 2 is shaped not only by its institutional design, but also by the ways in which political actors communicate and frame its social and distributive consequences. This makes EU ETS 2 a critical case for examining the politics of climate communication. Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) constitutes a particularly important (yet still understudied) context for this analysis. The region is characterised by lower income levels, a stronger dependence on fossil-fuel-intensive energy systems, and persistent ambivalence toward EU integration (Perdana & Vielle, 2026). These structural and historical conditions provide fertile ground for political actors to mobilise distributive concerns, national-sovereignty claims, and Eurosceptic narratives in response to climate policy. Recent research shows that far-right parties have increasingly shifted away from explicit climate scepticism toward narrative strategies that reframe climate policy as economically harmful, socially unjust, or imposed by distant EU elites (Schwörer & Fernández-García, 2023). However, we know far less about how these evolving rhetorical patterns are deployed specifically around EU ETS 2 particularly across the full breadth of CEE member states, where the household-level scope of the scheme generates new opportunities for politicisation and reframing. This paper examines how far-right parties in CEE narrate and politicise EU ETS 2. Our research applies the Narrative Policy Framework to analyse how policymakers strategically mobilise narrative elements to delegitimise ETS 2 and contest its implementation. The paper adopts a genuinely pan-regional comparative perspective, analysing parliamentary debates, party manifestos, and political speeches of far-right parties in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia between 2022 and 2026. The analysis identifies cross-national narrative patterns alongside country-specific variations, with particular attention to how EU ETS 2 is embedded within broader critiques of the European Green Deal and EU climate governance. By situating EU ETS 2 within the communicative strategies of the CEE far right at a region-wide comparative scale, the paper contributes to debates on the politicisation of carbon pricing (Patterson, 2022), climate policy legitimacy (Buzogány, Parks, & Torney, 2025), and the evolving relationship between Euroscepticism and climate governance (Buzogany & Ćetković, 2021).