Presentation short abstract

The paper examines far-right mobilization against renewable energy infrastructures in peripheralized regions in Germany, adopting a socio-territorial lens. It argues that aesthetic regimes of landscape imaginaries play a key role in shaping the conflicts’ political trajectories.

Presentation long abstract

In many European countries, the expansion of renewable energy infrastructure has become a key arena for far-right mobilization, often framed as green backlash (Otteni/Weisskircher 2022). Heated debates and fierce opposition have been sparked by the construction of solar farms and wind park repowering, as well as regulatory changes in heating and insulation policy (Biresselioglu et al. 2024). We argue that these conflicts cannot be sufficiently explained through notions of far-right exceptionalism or reductive diagnoses of “NIMBYism”. Instead, this paper revisits the culturally loaded figure of landscape as a key analytic lens for understanding contemporary far-right ecologies and energyscapes (Lintz/Leibenath 2020). It asks to what ends the far right mobilizes against what it frames as an intrusion into the “German Seelenlandschaft” (AfD 2025). What pressures do such nativist mobilizations and far-right party politics exert on emancipatory strands of political ecology? And how might such pressures—paradoxically—open space for renewed critiques of “green capitalism” and its infrastructural formations? To explore these questions, we draw on empirical material from two peripheralized regions in Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, adopting a socio-territorial lens (Autor*innenkollektiv Terra-R 2025). Our analysis shows how metabolic relationships emerging from everyday practices of energy-landscaping (Castán Broto 2019) are ideologically inflected and spatially constrained. Building on Walter Benjamin’s reflections on aesthetic regimes, we argue that such interpretations rely on entrenched “cultural landscape” ideals. This underscores the need both to question these regressive imaginaries and to examine how progressive energy policies intersect with them—while also exploring alternative forms of everyday energy-landscaping.