Vol. 17 No. 33 (2026): Precarious dwelling. Everyday practices, caring relations, and meaning-making processes
Special Issue: Climate Change and Far-right Politics: Between Adoption and Adaptation

Victims of the Green Transition: Harm Narratives in AfD’s Climate Skepticism

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  • Till Hilmar
Till Hilmar
Department of Sociology, University of Vienna, Austria
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-17182

Published 2026-08-04

Keywords

  • climate skepticism,
  • victimhood,
  • Germany,
  • AfD,
  • narrative,
  • LLM
    • ...More
    Less

How to Cite

Hilmar, T. (2026). Victims of the Green Transition: Harm Narratives in AfD’s Climate Skepticism. SocietàMutamentoPolitica, 17(33), 157–168. https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-17182

Copyright (c) 2026 Till Hilmar

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This article examines how politicians from Germany’s main far right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), delegitimize climate policies and climate action in their political communication. To this end, it analyzes more than 430.000 tweets posted between 2009 and 2023. Drawing on combination of computational and qualitative analysis, it investigates how the negative effects of climate action is framed through narratives. The findings reveal two major strategies: first, climate policies are portrayed as harming specific “deserving” groups – like citizens, taxpayers, commuters, and workers – whose livelihoods are said to be threatened by rising costs; second, pro-climate actors are vilified as “naïve”, “delusional”, and a threat to the moral order of society. Through these affective narrative configurations, AfD communication positions the party as the rational defender of the “middle of society”, effectively inverting the climate script by shifting attention from environmental catastrophe to alleged economic and social decline.

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