.jpeg)
Why the
far right’s push for “climate realism” is winning political ground
Are
climate policies damaging the economy? Till Hilmar writes that
despite the staggering costs of climate change, opposing climate policies on
economic grounds is becoming an increasingly effective strategy for Europe’s
far right.
Far-right
parties in Europe have long portrayed climate action as economic self-harm. As far back as 2015, one politician
from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) declared that the
German energy transition “must be told from the perspective of a child whose
mother can no longer pay the electricity bill”.
These are
not economic arguments in the technical sense, but moral stories about society:
stories about decline for all, singling out who contributes, who suffers and
who is to blame. In these narratives, climate policy is staged as a drama of
victims and culprits.
Such
tropes allow the far right to pose as emotionally controlled and rational defenders of
common sense and “ordinary” people against allegedly irrational elites. And
while these arguments have been
made for over a decade, they are now finding more traction than ever as a
broader backlash against climate policy builds.
Climate
policy as economic vandalism
Arguments
that cast doubt on the motives of pro-climate actors are central to this
rhetoric. Pro-climate actors are portrayed as opportunists who seek attention,
profit or power under the guise of saving the planet. The AfD and the Freedom
Party of Austria (FPÖ) depict them as the architects of a morally
corrupt redistribution scheme. Indeed, the far right talks about climate and
eco-social policies in a strikingly similar way to its welfare rhetoric.
Take the
example of the Klimabonus,
a universal measure introduced in Austria in 2022 to offset the costs of carbon
pricing, differentiated by region to account for weaker public infrastructure
in rural areas. The FPÖ scandalised this measure, claiming that “asylum
seekers” and “criminals” were profiting from it. A universal eco-social policy
became, in far-right storytelling, a tale of injustice – a redistribution from
the “deserving” to the “undeserving”, and proof, in their narrative, that
climate policy benefits the “wrong” people. The measure was scrapped in 2025.
Rising
energy prices have proven a particularly effective target. The far right steps
in to explain inflation through simple causal stories: a “climate industry”
that wants “artificially” high energy costs, governments that punish “car
drivers” and the “hard-working” middle by deliberately raising prices.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, these
narratives became even more powerful. Amid dramatic price hikes, the far right
sought to shift blame, attributing rising costs not to Russia’s war, but to
domestic green policies. In Germany, the AfD’s long-standing attacks on the
energy transition served as the main strategy to delegitimise public support
for sanctions against Russia.
Defining
realism
This idea
that climate policies amount to a kind of “planned economy” – allegedly
bureaucratic and driven by people who lack a basic sense of cost-efficiency
– serves a clear purpose. What these actors are aiming for is to
present themselves as the voice of economic reason. They
fashion themselves as the only realists left, the ones who dare to tell the
truth about the real economic consequences of climate policy.
Like
Cassandra, the mythological prophet condemned to tell the truth but to never be
believed, they warn of economic ruin that governments ignore. They mock the
apocalyptic “end-of-the-world” narrative of environmentalists but create one of
their own: an impending economic downfall in which ordinary citizens lose
everything. This rhetorical inversion allows them to replace the climate
catastrophe with the drama of economic collapse, and to depict
climate-conscious actors as members of a narrow, self-interested sect, instead
of advocates of a universal cause.
In
interviews and focus groups conducted as part of the CIDAPE
project, we often heard that while many citizens know little about the
specific details of climate policies, they still tend to perceive them as
“unrealistic”, especially when it comes to large-scale changes in consumption
or ambitious decarbonisation targets. The far right knows how to tap into these
sentiments, adopting the tone of a business-minded, pragmatic, measured
approach. This has given rise to a struggle over who gets to define what
realism means in the context of the green transition.
The
economic costs of climate change
Of
course, the numbers tell a story that contradicts the far right’s narratives.
The economic costs of not acting on climate change are, by any available
measure, staggering. According to the 2025 Lancet Countdown on health and climate change, extreme
weather events caused $304 billion in economic losses in 2024 and unchecked
climate change could erode up to 19% of global income by 2050.
Struggling
industries in Europe are entangled in global competition, and China has
outpaced Europe in critical sustainable technologies. Europe’s transition is
too slow: in electric vehicle production, it is now lagging behind China. The
far right’s supposed economic wisdom – and the concerning tendency of
centrist actors to buy into its version of “realism” to downplay the backlash
against decarbonisation goals – risks trapping the world in yet another
fossil-fuel age, a scenario already unfolding dramatically in the United
States.
Climate
change exacerbates existing economic inequalities. The unequal distributional
outcomes of climate policies like carbon taxation are also considerable. Rising
energy prices worsen economic insecurity, as energy poverty threatens
low-income households. Yet in richer welfare states such as Germany and
Austria, these effects are partly offset by eco-social policies.
There is
clearly a problem in how the role of climate and eco-social
policy, as the main tool for addressing inequality, is communicated. As
Michael Vaughan and colleagues have recently
pointed out, it is alarmingly easy to misrepresent social and economic
inequalities in public debate, and this holds true for climate politics as
well.
We need
to do a better job of connecting climate science and climate economics to what
inequality actually looks and feels like for people struggling to make ends
meet. And we need to a better job of explaining how climate action can make
these conditions better, not worse.
For
more information, see the author’s new
study in Environmental
Politics.
Note:
This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP –
European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image
credit: fokke baarssen / Shutterstock.com
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário