Parliamentarians as “Backlash Mobilisers”: Climate Backlash in the Plenary Debates of the European Parliament (2004 - 2024)

Séminaire axe Partis, Élections, Représentation with Reja Ambra Wyss (Oxford)

Abstrat

As climate change mitigation is becoming increasingly important, some citizens are lashing out against green policies, partially due to the financial burden they pose. However, little is known about how the political elite engages in this so-called “climate backlash”. Utilising an original dataset comprising of approximately 1,800 hand-coded European Parliament (EP) speeches on climate change between 2004 and 2024, this study adopts a mixed-methods approach to measure MEPs’ rhetorical engagement in climate change backlash. Building on the suggestion that climate change backlash is a “reactionary political behaviour” (see Patterson et al., 2026), but also strongly connected to the idea of a “green discontent”, this paper operationalises “climate backlash related rhetoric” as arguments that suggest a combative opposition to climate change mitigation and those that underline a societal or economic loss due to climate change mitigation. Furthermore, this is contrasted with climate change sceptic arguments.

First results suggest that climate backlash related rhetoric has been present in the EP since 2004 and that being a far-right party member is strongly associated with the use of climate backlash related rhetoric. However, going beyond far-right MEPs, the preliminary results also imply that there is no evidence of a broad elite engagement in such rhetoric. Secondly, controlling for age, gender, region and ideology shows that MEPs from more recent legislative periods might not be more likely to engage in climate backlash related rhetoric. Finally, arguments emphasising an economic or societal loss due to climate change mitigation are very present in Eastern European MEPs’ speeches, starting from 2004, and Eastern European far-right MEPs only limitedly engage in climate backlash rhetoric otherwise. This suggests that it is ultimately MEPs from the Western European far-right that drive the “greenlash” forward.