Populists seek dividends from a climate change backlash

Welcome back. At the COP28 climate summit that opens in Dubai next week, Europe will once again present itself as a world leader in efforts to combat climate change and reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Are these ambitions threatened by a rise in public support for populist and hard-right political movements that, to varying degrees, embrace climate scepticism? I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

Dutch upset

By convulsing Dutch politics, climate controversies played a part in the battle for power that culminated on Wednesday in an unexpected parliamentary election victory for Geert Wilders and his far-right Freedom party.

Earlier this year, a farmers’ protest movement won provincial elections with a campaign against government plans to cut nitrogen-based emissions by encouraging a reduction in livestock herds.

That campaign undermined the ruling Dutch coalition and paved the way for the snap national election won by Wilders. As one Dutch minister told the FT’s Sam Fleming in April, the risk is that mainstream political parties fail to carry the public with them as they step up action against climate change.

‘Green deal’ consensus under strain

Since the EU unveiled its “Green Deal” plans in 2019, the 27-nation bloc has made steady progress in designing and approving dozens of pieces of legislation affecting all areas of the economy from industry to consumer behaviour.

It is a creditable achievement, given strong, unexpected headwinds in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic and the disruption to energy supplies caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as Kira Taylor writes for Euractiv.com.

In principle, mainstream European political parties of the right, centre and left, backed by broad sections of public opinion, support a range of measures to fight climate change. However, if we look closely at recent political trends and opinion surveys, we see some evidence that this consensus is coming under strain – and not only in the Netherlands.

In a YouGov poll conducted in April in seven countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the UK), some 48 per cent of respondents said they “strongly oppose” or “tend to oppose” a ban on the production and sale of petrol and diesel cars. Only 39 per cent strongly supported or tended to support such a ban.

The Guardian’s Jon Henley drew the conclusion that voters’ enthusiasm for climate change policies weakens as they see potentially undesirable effects on their incomes and lifestyles.

More broadly, the EU’s green agenda has come under political pressure as next year’s European parliament elections draw nearer, and as some initiatives at national level turn out to be unpopular — such as Germany’s attempt to ban new gas boilers.

In May, French president Emmanuel Macron called for a pause in new green regulations at EU level — and, a few months later, dropped a proposal for a gas boiler ban.

Macron made similar concessions in 2019, abandoning a planned rise in fuel taxes after the gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) protests that erupted across France.

In summary, European policymakers face a challenge, at a time of intense pressure on living standards, in trying to persuade voters that the green transition is in their own interests – as Susi Dennison and Mats Engström write for the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank.

This makes climate change a topic that populist or hard-right parties believe they can exploit to their electoral advantage.

Voting records in the European parliament

A useful way to understand where political parties stand on the climate issue is to look at their votes in the European parliament. Here is a good, colourful guide by Climate Action Network Europe, published in 2019, which classified pan-European party groups as either “defenders”, “delayers” or “dinosaurs” on climate change and broke down the results by country.

As one would expect, Green and left-leaning parties have the strongest record on supporting EU climate policies. But what is really striking is that resistance and rejection are to be found not only on the nationalist, Eurosceptic right, but also from the mainstream centre-right European People’s party (EPP).

Among the EPP parties with the worst records are Poland’s Civic Platform — hailed last month as the nation’s saviour, after defeating the conservative nationalist Law and Justice party in parliamentary elections — and Italy’s Forza Italia, which is part of that country’s ruling coalition.

In other words, some centre-right parties support delays or watered-down measures on climate change, partly to head off electoral threats from farther to the right. It bears comparison with the way these parties are also taking a harder line on migration and asylum issues.

Varieties of climate scepticism

Populist and hard-right parties don’t follow a consistent line on climate change. National differences are important. However, certain similarities of outlook are clear.

In this piece for the Peterson Institute of International Economics, Monica de Bolle observes:

These parties and the political leaders associated with them are more likely to favour energy sources from fossil fuels, fewer environmental regulations, and less international co-operation on the fight against climate change.

But climate scepticism takes at least four forms, as Iris Beau Segers and Manès Weisskircher explain in an article for the University of Oslo’s Center for Research on Extremism.

There is “trend scepticism”, which doubts or denies the phenomenon of climate change altogether. There is “attribution scepticism”, which disputes that there’s a link between global warming and human civilisation.

“Impact scepticism” questions whether climate change represents a problem for the world. Finally, “process scepticism” involves opposition to the political and scientific handling of the issue.

National differences to the fore

Along this spectrum of anti-establishment dissent, some hard-right parties are in practice less climate-sceptic than their rhetoric might lead one to suppose.

For example, Austria’s Freedom party (FPÖ) once tended to dismiss the scientific consensus on man-made climate change as a tissue of lies invented by the liberal media.

But when the FPÖ shared power in a coalition government from 2017 to 2019, it acquiesced in the EU’s 2050 net-zero target and agreed that Austria should aim to reach 100 per cent renewable energy use in electricity, as outlined in this article in the Journal of European Public Policy.

In France, the far-right Rassemblement National has abandoned outright climate change denial. Jordan Bardella, who became the party’s president last year (though the person truly in charge remains Marine Le Pen), says:

Our political family would be making a big mistake if it behaved as blindly on the environmental issue as the left has done on immigration for the past 30 years. We can no longer afford to deny it.

However, none of this makes the Rassemblement National “green”. The party embraces a form of environmentalism based on trade protectionism, the relocation of industry to France and the defence of national identity and living standards, especially in small towns and rural areas.

The party’s hard-edged patriotism, mixed with a somewhat sentimental defence of traditional ways of life, draws on 20th-century French radical right trends such as the Chemises Vertes (Greenshirts) movement created in the 1930s by Henry Dorgères — on which the authoritative study is the American historian Robert Paxton’s 1997 book French Peasant Fascism.

Discontent fuels Germany’s AfD

In my view, the example that deserves closest attention is that of Alternative for Germany, the far-right party that now lies second in national opinion polls.

AfD takes a harder line than many such European parties in rejecting climate change policies, according to Christoph Richter of the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society, a research body based in the east German city of Jena:

The party doubts fundamental scientific findings about human-caused climate change, and considers the corresponding climate protection measures to be pointless.

Migration is usually considered the issue driving up support for the AfD. But after the party made strong gains last month in elections in the west German states of Bavaria and Hesse, Manfred Güllner of pollsters Forsa said he thought a bigger factor was the government’s plans to phase out gas-fired boilers and replace them with heat pumps.

In conclusion, I offer this thought. Tackling climate change is a quintessentially cross-border challenge, requiring co-operation among national governments of various political persuasions. But populist and far-right parties derive their support from something quite different – the assertion of sovereignty and defence of national identity.

Quite apart from the difficulty of securing global agreement on climate change measures, the political problems associated with this issue are now piling up for Europe at EU and national level.

More on this topic

Five trends in decarbonisation that are shaping global politics — an analysis by Nat Bullard for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Tony’s picks of the week

• Sweden, a wealthy nation famed for its progressive values, is wrestling with gang warfare and one of Europe’s highest levels of fatal shootings, the FT’s Richard Milne reports

• With credible postwar security guarantees, Ukraine stands a good chance of meeting the economic criteria for joining the EU, according to a study by the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies and the Bertelsmann Stiftung