CNN
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Germany was once seen as a climate champion. It set ambitious targets to slash planet-heating pollution. Its Green party rode high in the 2021 elections, becoming part of the government.
Fast-forward less than four years and that image seems to be unraveling.
Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party which denies human-caused climate change and rails against climate policies as unaffordable and elitist, has propelled itself to center stage. It placed second overall in last weekend’s national elections, nearly doubling its share of the vote.
The party, which boasts support from Elon Musk, is highly unlikely to be part of the next government — a long-standing “firewall” currently excludes other parties from collaborating with it — but the AfD is now impossible to ignore. As is its climate stance.
What happened in Germany is part of a global trend, analysts say, as populist far-right parties move from the political fringes to the mainstream, bringing their climate skepticism with them and shifting the political debate.
“There’s a far right that is attacking the climate agenda in every country,” said Luisa Neubauer, a climate activist from Fridays for Future Germany. “There is a real deliberate effort to eliminate and destabilize climate policies,” she told CNN.
This is happening even as the impacts of the climate crisis intensify, she added, pointing to deadly climate change-fueled extreme weather, including Hurricane Helene and the LA fires.
Experts say the roots of the shift toward far-right parties can be traced back years.
The cumulative impacts of the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine have driven up the cost of living and fostered “widespread discontent with the ‘political establishment,’” said Paula-Charlotte Matlach, an analyst based in Germany at the think tank the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
The AfD, which ran on a vehemently anti-immigration platform, has surged in popularity as the country grapples with an economic slump, high inflation and high electricity prices, while it weans itself off Russian gas.
The election campaign was nearly silent on climate, said Felix Schulz, a researcher at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies. “That, by itself, is a victory for the far right,” which is managing to shift the political narrative, he told CNN.
The center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which came out top in the election and will form a coalition government, previously adopted a “pro-climate rhetoric” but that’s showing signs of strain, said Manès Weisskircher, a researcher at the Institute of Political Science in Germany.
The CDU has said it will abide by Germany’s climate targets but also sees a potentially long future for gas and wants to abolish regulations for phasing out combustion engine cars and gas-powered home heating.
In a speech at the end of the election campaign, CDU leader Friedrich Merz said he stood “for the majority who can think straight and who are still in their right minds,” and not, “for any green or left-wing nutcases.”
The most likely outcome of the election is a coalition between the CDU and the center-left SPD, with the Green party sidelined from government. This coalition is “unlikely to take the bold climate action we need,” said Heffa Schuecking, director of Urgewald, an environmental non-profit.
The AfD was successful in portraying climate measures “as elite-driven and disconnected from the concerns of ordinary citizens,” the ISD’s Matlach said. Similar dynamics are playing out in countries like Italy, the United States, Brazil and Australia, where far-right parties are framing climate change polices as expensive and restrictive, and calling those advocating for them alarmist and “woke,” she added.
“This has made achieving global climate goals more difficult,” Matlach said.
The situation has not been helped by people feeling they are not benefiting from climate action and worrying about changes to their lives, analysts say.
“We have entered the most intense industrial phase of climate transitions worldwide,” said Olivia Lazard, a fellow at Carnegie Europe. Conversations have focused on the need to reduce planet-heating pollution rather than the actions required to get there. This has left “a lot of people confused in Europe and beyond about what it would take,” she told CNN.
Despite the rhetoric of far right parties, climate change considerations often simmer underneath, she said. At the same time as some politicians seek to undermine climate action, those who are serious realize the energy transition is vital to being competitive as the geopolitical landscape shifts. Take President Trump, she said, who “talks aggressively about critical minerals.”
But, she warned, this view sets up climate change as something “redefining the foundations of power,” rather than a problem to address through collective action to ensure a peaceful transition. “Their view of our future is much darker,” she added.
For climate activist Neubauer, it’s vital those who believe in climate action set out their position clearly and in opposition to far right rhetoric.
“It is easy to assume that now isn’t the time for climate,” but that’s a mistake, she said. “As long as (far right parties) define the way that we talk about climate, we won’t have a climate discourse.”