Normalizing Calamities. Exploring Secondary Denialism in Italian and Spanish Political Parties’ Environmental Crisis Communication

Crisis management scholarship refers to environmental disasters as impactful occurrences that bring national authorities together. That soon stops being the case once causes and remedies are addressed, as climate-related political issues have proven to produce a multitude of opposing framing strategies. Among them, the concept of secondary denialism encompasses a variety of beliefs that, while accepting the scientific consensus on climate change, downplay its current impact, hence denying the urgency of action. Recent literature has highlighted multiple normalization strategies that contribute to climate inaction by framing environmental politics either as a low-priority issue, the perils of which should be tolerable in the near future, or as a technical problem that will eventually be solved through economic agreements. A key element of secondary climate-change denialism is failure to acknowledge systemic causes playing a role in local occurrences. This paper aims to assess how secondary denialism can be bolstered by policymakers in the light of the most evident (and tragic) environmental crises, with a focus on the discursive strategies deployed to normalize climate-related events and/or legitimize inaction. To do so, we rely on a comparative multimodal analysis of political discourse by major Italian and Spanish parties following the 2023 Emilia-Romagna floods and the 2024 Valencian cold drop (DANA). We triangulate institutional sources by nine parties from the whole political spectrum to provide a comprehensive overview of how climate-related crises are framed in relation to contexts, audiences, and medium affordances. These include relevant social media posts, parliamentary sessions on emergency measures, and party rallies addressing the disasters. A multimodal qualitative approach is used to implement elements of visual and performance analysis on posts and rally recordings, thus accounting for meaningful nuances embedded in non-textual modes of communication. First results partially resonate with existing literature on alternative frames on climate change, it being either undiscernible or easily solvable with proper funding. Intense blameshifting is also present, as expected. However, rather than open delegitimization, politicization strategies are consistently articulated around three main cleavages, namely the urgency/normalization, economic/human, and local/systemic framing axes, with significant differences across communicative arenas. Moreover, normalizing frames appear to be deployed by the political left as well. While being an exploratory study, this paper thus wishes to contribute to existing literature on environmental politics communication by assessing how parties’ framing strategies can push secondary denialism by normalizing climate-related emergencies into administrative problems.