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This article inquires into how contemporary populist radical right parties relate to environmental issues of countryside and climate protection, by analyzing relevant discourses of the British National Party (BNP) and the Danish People's Party (DPP). It does so by looking at party materials along three dimensions: the aesthetic, the symbolic, and the material. The article discusses to what extent the parties' political stances on environmental issues are conditioned by deeper structures of nationalist ideology and the understandings of nature embedded therein. It illustrates a fundamental difference between the way nationalist actors engage in, on the one hand, the protection of nature as national countryside and landscape, epitomizing the nation's beauty, harmony and purity over which the people are sovereign. On the other hand, they deny or cast doubt on environmental risks located at a transnational level, such as those that relate to climate. The article argues that this apparent inconsistency is rooted in the ideological tenets of nationalism as the transnational undermines the nationalist ideal of sovereignty.
keywords
British National Party, climate change, Danish People's Party, environmentalism, global warming, landscape, populism, right-wing extremism
Over the past two decades, research on populist radical right parties (PRRP; Mudde 2007) such as the Austrian Freedom Party, the British National Party, the Danish People's Party, and the National Front has expanded in line with those parties' increasing electoral success. Indeed, PRRP constitute a wide spectrum of more or less anti-liberal democratic parties, ranging from radicals to increasingly mainstream moderates. Given that research on these parties, be they radical or moderate, has primarily focused on their anti-immigration rhetoric (see Mudde 2007 for a state-of-the-art discussion), our contribution involves investigating how such parties relate to another key contemporary issue: environmental crises at both national (countryside and landscape) and transnational (climate politics) levels. We thus pose the following research questions: first, how do contemporary PRRP mobilize nature with regard to both national as well as transnational environmental phenomena? Second, we embed this question within a wider attempt to clarify the effects of PRRP nationalist ideology on their respective environmental stances by asking: how is their nationalist ideology reflected in the shift in stances indicated by the differences between articulations of the traditional environmental sphere of the national countryside and articulations...