Europe's far right and its attitude towards climate change and environmentalism

Abstract

Recent years have been marked by two conspicuous developments in the political landscape. The first one is the rising wave of nationalism in Europe reflected in increased parliamentary representation of far-right parties, both nationally and on EU level, which has probably reached its zenith with the successful Brexit campaign. The second one is the growing concern for and increasing engagement in addressing the burning issue of climate change and environmentalism. This paper embarks on deciphering the interconnection between the two developments. The objective of this thesis is to perform mapping of the current positions of Europe's far right on the environmental and climate agenda. For this purpose, I have performed a qualitative content analysis of the 2019 EP election programmes/manifestos of seven European far-right parties. The analysis is framed within four related concepts: 1) climate scepticism; 2) climate change visà-vis globalisation; 3) the role of international organisations/instruments in addressing climate change; and 4) energy transition. The results of the analysis show that, despite the parties sharing the same ideology and system of values, they do not have a uniform stance on climatechange and environmentalism and their attitude towards these issues varies considerably