Construction and Linguistic Portrayal of Climate Change Phenomenon in Right-Wing Populist Parties' Political Discourse

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to examine the construction and linguistic portrayal of the climate change phenomenon in the right-wing populist parties' discourse. The literature has so far mainly assumed automatic relationship between right- wing ideology and climate-refusal and did not go beyond analysis of specific climate-skeptical parties. We aim to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing both climate-supportive and disengaged RWP parties, as well their communication strategies on the matter. In order to disentangle inconsistencies, paradoxes and contradictions in text and discourse-internal structures, as well as to demystify the possible persuasive or manipulative tendencies of RWP parties, this paper employs a Discourse- Historical Approach in order to examine how these actors transform, translate and modify the meaning and role of a climate change in their texts. Moreover, the focus of our paper is on the three strategies within DHA - nomination, predication and argumentation. The analysis included three RWP parties - Alternative for Germany; Hungarian Fidesz and French National Rally, We found that the three examined parties with different climate policy preferences tend to deploy markedly different manipulative or persuasive strategies, and utilize different rhetorical and...