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