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.