Beyond Climate Change Denial: Conspiratorial Framing of Nature and Progress in European Far-Right Media

The paper aims to shed light on how far-right media negotiate the relationship between climate denial, environmental discourse, and competing imaginaries of nature and progress within the European context by focusing on conspiratorial framing strategies. Starting from a comparative analysis of two far-right alternative media outlets—Il Primato Nazionale in Italy and COMPACT-Magazin in Germany—the paper explores the tension between climate change denial and broader far-right conceptions of the relationship between nature and progress in contemporary Europe (Caiani & Lubarda, 2024; Lubarda, 2020). The study investigates how conspiratorial narratives articulate ambivalent and contested understandings of environmental transformation, modernity, and societal development. The analysis builds on research on conspiracism and far-right environmental communication (Douglas & Sutton, 2015; Forchtner, 2019), and examines whether conspiracy theories are primarily mobilised to negate the existence of climate change or to delegitimise environmentalism as a cultural, political, and ideological project. Particular attention is paid to how references to “nature” are constructed discursively, oscillating between representations of nature as stable and self-regulating and critiques of environmentalism as an obstacle to progress and sovereignty. Methodologically, the contribution combines frame analysis (Entman, 1993) with the identification of recurring topoi following the Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001). The empirical material consists of print special issues and online articles published between 2019 and 2025.