Climate change: bad news for populism? How the Rassemblement National used COVID-19 to promote its environmental agenda

Abstract

This article uses the French Rassemblement National (RN) as a case study to examine how the populist radical right (PRR) prepares for a world after COVID-19 dominated by climate change concerns. Research suggests that certain measures introduced to contain the virus – such as the establishment of strict border and travel restrictions – may legitimize the PRR’s protectionist and anti-immigration agendas, yet few have examined whether or how PRR parties have used COVID-19 to promote their environmental agenda. If anything, the expectation has been that the pandemic would hurt the PRR precisely because its effects, unlike climate change, cannot be dismissed as a “hoax.” This view overlooks not only the “environmental turn” recently taken by several PRR parties but also the possibility that public awareness of the causal link between climate change and COVID-19 may work to their advantage. The analysis presented in this article highlights this possibility, showing that the RN used COVID-19 not only to capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiment but also to bolster its self-image as a champion of environmental protection.

Rights

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2022.104

Repository URI

https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/303360/