Climate change is being used as an explicit wedge by radical right parties that adopt a distinctively adversarial stance toward green policies. This strategy breaks with mainstream party consensus and aims to mobilise voter concerns about climate initiatives, reshaping issue competition around environmental policy.
🔎 How the evidence was gathered
- Nearly half a million party press releases from 76 political parties across nine European democracies were analyzed.
- State-of-the-art multilingual large language models were used to identify and classify climate policy rhetoric across parties and languages.
- Supplementary survey data were examined to measure voter attitudes toward climate policies across the political spectrum.
📊 What the analysis shows
- Radical right parties consistently frame climate policy in oppositional, adversarial terms that diverge significantly from the mainstream party consensus.
- This oppositional rhetoric is distinct in tone and content, aiming to split existing coalitions rather than simply offer policy alternatives.
- Survey evidence reveals climate policy skepticism among voters across ideological lines, underscoring the potential for climate issues to mobilise voters beyond the radical right's core base.
💡 Why it matters
- Demonstrates that climate change can function as a strategic wedge issue, not only a cross-cutting policy domain, with clear electoral mobilization potential.
- Advances understanding of issue competition by showing how rhetorical strategy—rather than only policy proposals—can realign voter coalitions and challenge established party consensus on climate policy.
- Offers a replicable, multilingual text-analysis approach for studying party politicization of salient policy areas.
