This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
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Spain’s VOX party and the threat of ‘international environmental populism’
By: []
Date: 2021-09
The Spanish right-wing populist party VOX is a well-known ‘climate change denier’. This is why many analysts have interpreted its electoral success – the party is today the third largest in the Spanish parliament, having been founded in 2013 with the objective of defending the country’s national unity from the Catalan secessionist threat – as more evidence that we live in a ‘post-truth’ age, and age in which emotion carries more weight than objective facts. A close look at the development of VOX’s climate change agenda, however, reveals a more complicated and troubling picture.
There is no question that, during most of its short history, VOX has spread misinformation about the severity of the threat of global warming, downplaying its dangers. Borrowing from the Trump playbook, the party has often cast climate change as a hoax and the environmental movement as a globalist plot against national sovereignty and prosperity. The justification of one of its MPs, Francisco José Contreras, for opposing Spain’s first Climate Change Law encapsulates the party’s dismissive attitude towards the issue. During a parliamentary session last April, Contreras remarked that global warming may turn out not to be such a bad thing because it will “reduce mortality caused by cold weather”.
Unsurprisingly, VOX critics jumped at the opportunity to make fun of the party’s doubt-mongering tactics. “Sure, and more droughts will reduce mortality caused by drowning,” a Twitter user quipped. One of the major Spanish dailies joined the fray, with an article entitled ‘One, Great, and Warm’, a play on Franco’s nationalist motto “Una, Grande y Libre” (One, Great, and Free).
This kind of ironic humor from those with science-based beliefs is understandable given VOX’s disdain for the environmental movement, and yet it runs the risk of diverting our attention from critical developments in VOX’s climate agenda. This and similar attempts to delegitimize VOX by labeling it ‘post-truth’ may lead us to miss the nuances of the party’s complex engagement with climate science.
VOX as a case of climate change denial?
It must be pointed out that VOX has rarely rejected climate science per se, as the label ‘post-truth’ would suggest. More often, VOX’s anti-environmental rhetoric has been directed at environmental ‘elites’ who it accuses of mobilizing scientific expertise to avoid political contestation and legislate against the interests of ‘the people’. As VOX leader Santiago Abascal put it, the main issue at stake is not the ‘evidence’ of climate change, which his party accepts, but the ‘totalitarian’ tendency to submit climate policy to the dictates of the scientific community. “Our concern,” he insisted, “is with the rise of a climate religion with which one is not allowed to disagree.”
We should also consider that VOX’s stance towards climate change has undergone, if not a change of heart, at least a change in tune. Take, for instance, Abascal’s speech in the failed motion of no confidence against the Spanish government in October 2020. After denouncing the hypocrisy of environmental elites who moralize about climate change but fly on their own private jets to international summits, he outlined VOX’s alternative to the government’s ‘job-destroying’ climate policy. Two key proposals included in VOX’s green agenda, which Abascal tellingly named ‘true ecology’, were the creation of a national ‘energy autarchy’ and the re-industrialization of Spain towards a green economy. He prophesied that these policies would create no less than an “economic and environmental miracle”, bringing about a “green Spain, clean and prosperous, industrialized and in harmony with the environment”.
Over the past few months, VOX has redoubled efforts to consolidate its environmental strategy in collaboration with its partners in the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ERC) in the European Parliament. The development of an alternative to the EU’s climate change agenda was one of the main topics of the ECR’s meeting in Madrid in early July. Abascal forcefully conveyed the importance of this task by referring to it as “one of the main challenges facing the European conservative movement in the coming decades”. In stark contrast with the perception that right-wing populist parties deny the reality of global warming, he placed the preservation of the ‘natural heritage’ at the core of the group’s ‘patriotic’ solution to climate change.
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