Abstract
Over the last decades, the rise of the far right and populist movements in Europe and its resulting impact on liberal democracies and party politics have been subject to a vivid debate among researchers. In addition, research, the public and politics intensively discussed climate change. While both subjects have been analyzed on their own, this study focused on their nexus. Existing research highlights that many populist far-right parties (PFRPs) show in one way or another climate obstruction. To understand their climate communication, I analyse how national established PFRPs in Germany (AfD), Spain (Vox), and Austria (FPÖ) frame the issue of climate change in their communication. Secondly, even though public support for such political parties and movements is growing, research also agrees that in particular the communication of major parties (mostly the big parties left and right of the political center) is present in the public sphere. I argue, that to understand the PFRPs’ discourse about climate change, it is central to also include the national context. Thus, before I analysed PFRPs climate change communication, I examined the national policy field of climate change, defined by the understanding of climate change of the major parties in a country. In a first step, drawing on the methodological apparatus of critical discourse studies, combining the discourse-historical approach (DHA) and conceptual history or Begriffsgeschichte, I studied the understanding of climate change of major parties in Germany, Spain, and Austria, thus defined the national policy field of climate change for this research. In a second step, using DHA, I investigated how, when and in which context RWPs communicate about climate change. Both parts integrated a variety of documents such as social media posts, press releases, parliamentary debates, policy documents, party manifestos etc. over a period of five years (2016-2020). Results revealed that while the major parties showed willingness to strengthen climate protection, the PFRPs included various climate action obstructionist arguments in their communication. Aspects and nuances of such arguments could often be connected to the respective national policy field. This research project shows how important it is to investigate certain actors and their communication or discourses as well as to understand the national context to comprehend individual parties’ communication.