Retrogradism in context. Varieties of right-wing populist climate politics

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we argue against an all-too-easy ‘climate bad guy’ thesis, which holds that in right-wing populism climate change denialism or at least skepticism is one-dimensional, i.e. right-wing populist parties generally reject climate change mitigation. To this end, we present a revision of the ‘populism as thin-centered ideology’ approach and situate populist politics in the context of a process we refer to as devolution of democracy. We develop a heuristic list of distinct populist climate policy claims for empirical investigation and then apply a contextualist approach by examining differing right-wing populist party positions on climate change mitigation within a two-level framework that covers their positioning towards both the global climate agenda and domestic low-carbon policies. We substantiate our thesis that populist climate politics is retrograde as well as context-relative by drawing on empirical cases from Germany, Austria, and Poland.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• climate change mitigation
• populism
• democracy
• right-wing populist party
• crisis of democracy

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the three reviewers for their thoughtful comments and helpful advice. An earlier version of this paper has been presented to the Ottawa Political Thought Research Network. We are grateful for comments by the participants. We also thank Maksymilian Zoll for providing his expertise on the PiS.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In the sense of Dewey’s notion of cooperative political action as solving complex public problems (Dewey 1927). Against this backdrop, a common critique of populists holds that they offer all too simple solutions for complex problems.

2. Since this is a scheme of interpretation, its proponents do not necessarily employ the term regression. The use of the term regression is often a figure of speech and not a conceptual use (Erdmann and Kneuer 2011).

3. That is why this is also an issue for left-wing populism. The term ‘green New Deal’ (Pettifor 2019) indicates that left-wing populism also makes use of retrogradism in climate policy. However, left populism is faced with a peculiar trade-off between following its productionist social justice agenda and the goal to abandon the productivist model to solve the ‘ecological question’ (Mouffe 2018, Kemmerzell et al. 2021).

4. All original quotations from German or Polish have been translated by the authors.

5. It needs to be noted that radical retrogradism remains no longer undisputed within the party. This is indicated by statements of the party’s youth organization to modify the position on climate change. On a more abstract level, Joerg Meuthen, co-leader of the party, expressed doubts that ‘the recipes of the day before yesterday were suitable to shape political solutions for tomorrow’ (cited in Weiland 2020).

6. In the 2019 European elections and the 2020 presidential elections, the PO joined forces with some smaller political parties within the European/Civic Coalition (KO).

7. The dedicated social orientation of the PiS finds expression even in the title of its recent party program, ‘The Polish Welfare State Model’ (Prawa i Sprawiedliwości [PiS] 2019).