Left-wing populism and ‘popular environmentalism’: a comparative analysis of the Belgian (PTB), French (LFI), German (Die Linke), and Spanish (Podemos/Sumar) cases – LeftPopEnv

Over the past decade, in Europe the rise of populist parties and the growing importance of climate issues on the public agenda have been increasingly well documented in the academic, media and political field. However, they are most often analysed separately. Some recent academic studies have sought to analyse the possible interactions between these two phenomena. Nevertheless, most of this work focuses on populist radical right parties (PRRPs) (Buzogány and Mohamad-Klotzbach 2022), which may be explained by an interest in understanding the drivers of climate scepticism. By contrast, and to provide new insights into the linkages between populist discourse and environmentalism, LeftPopEnv focuses on populist radical left parties (PRLPs). The project is timely as, in Europe, the rise and electoral breakthroughs of the radical left in the years 2010–2020 have been based on populist elements (March 2011), i.e., on a rhetoric (a) opposing the people to the elite, and (b) demanding a ‘radicalisation’ of democracy through the concept of popular sovereignty (Laclau 2005; Mudde 2004).

The project applies a mixed-methods research design to the comparative study of five European political parties in four countries: Die Linke (The Left) in Germany; La France insoumise (Unbowed France, LFI) in France; Parti du travail de Belgique (Workers’ Party of Belgium, PTB) in Belgium; Podemos (We Can) then Sumar (Add Up) in Spain. The project will situate the discourses of these organisations within the national contexts in which they evolve (e.g., party competition with green parties, salience of environmental issues, ideology to which the party is attached) to show the similarities and differences of their environmental discourse.

The project seeks to examine how the leaders and activists of left-wing populist parties address environmental issues and to analyse the extent to which their environmental discourse is framed in populist terms to understand how it differs from that of green parties. This will allow to question the relevance of the increasingly used concept of ‘environmental populism’ or ‘green populism’. It raises the question of the respective roles of populism as such and its host ideology in framing environmental issues, in link with recent research in the field of populism studies that has specifically called for a better distinction between populism and ‘what it travels with’ (Hunger and Paxton 2021).

This comparative analysis, first of its kind, aims to transform our understanding of partisan environmental narratives. LeftPopEnv will provide the basis for a first theoretical framework for understanding the left-wing populism/environmentalism articulation at a time when, in Europe, some parties of the populist left have succeeded in taking power, and others are emerging as major opposition forces in their countries (Kriesi and Pappas 2016). It thus responds to key priorities of Horizon Europe: to investigate the green transition and climate action, with a special focus on populism. The project fits the SH2 Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems.