Paper Short Abstract:

This paper sheds light on the diversity of far-right environmental politics and hate discourses in Europe by contextually examining a semi-peripheral Eastern European variant – that of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) and a Southern European one –that of Vox.

Paper Abstract:

This paper sheds light on the diversity of far-right environmental politics in Europe by contextually examining a semi-peripheral Eastern European variant – that of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) and a Southern European one –that of Vox. Both extreme parties have leaders who style themselves as social activists (i.e. Santiago Abascal and George Simion), adhere to Christian values, and construct a national populist hate discourse against European and global elites, progressivists, feminists, and Islam. However, in practical terms, their environmental national-populism developed beginning with 2019 has significantly different policy-making and practical consequences: while Vox is greening capitalism, AUR strongly criticizes “predatory capitalism” and European imperialism and develops a mixture of environmentalism and nationalism. By drawing on our work (Alecu 2023; Ungureanu and Popartan 2023), we will inquire whether semi-peripheral positionality and religion (in AUR’s case, Orthodoxy; in Vox’s case, Catholicism) shape their differences within far-right environmental discourses. The paper demonstrates how their contrasting tropes about “national nature” and its enemies clash when brought together in Vox’s and AUR’s key environmental policies.

References

Ungureanu, Camil (2023) „The green, green grass of the nation. A new far-right ecology in Spain”, Political Geography

Alecu, Ana Raluca (2023) - The Christian Right in Europe: Movements, Networks, and Denominations, “Religious Actors and Their Political Agenda in Romania. From the Family Referendum to the Rise of the AUR”, Gionathan Lo Mascolo (ed.), Transcript Verlag