There are days when we want to rewind the cassette tape – or press the button.Rewind“, because the tapes are already in the past – to reframe reality. That’s what happened this week, as two countries, one on each continent, handed electoral victories to politicians who want to drag us back.
Javier Miley, in Argentina, and Geert Wilders, in the Netherlands – two far-right politicians – won the elections in their countries. Miley will be president, and Wilders will only come to power if he can form a governing coalition. Both have proposals that would take us backwards – on human rights, equality, defending the environment, and fighting climate change.
Miley and Wilders want to exit the Paris Agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions, want to increase fossil fuel extraction, maintain coal and gas power plants, and ignore renewable energy. Scientists’ warnings about the effects of climate change are turning into hysteria, if not conspiratorial complicity, or a Marxist or anti-capitalist hoax.
Change creates anxiety, and the world is changing rapidly. An economy in crisis leaves people without money to buy most basic goods – such as housing. The lack of transparency of governments in decision-making increases suspicions of corruption among elites.
News comes from everywhere to show us the instability of the world: natural disasters, wars. We are told that we have to change our lifestyle quickly to save the planet. We have to make the “transition”: active, ecological. Changing the economic model.
The JUSTENERGY study, conducted by the Center for Research and Social Intervention of Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon, presented this week, and which Luciano Álvarez writes about here, analyzed several Portuguese newspapers, including PÚBLICO, and concluded that they “tend to propagate an image “Simplified.” Decarbonization and green energy perspective,” which is commonly referred to as the energy transition.
what’s the problem? Susanna Patel, one of the authors, says that by avoiding “a more informed discussion with objective data that integrates the different impacts, positive and negative, that renewable energies can have,” it “adds contradictions that can, even indirectly, encourage adherence to discourses.” By far-right parties in Portugal.”
In Portugal, Chiga represents this transnational movement of far-right parties that share similar rhetoric and actions. Like Vox in Spain, which is not about climate change, but about “climate religion.”
Although the environment or climate is practically absent from Shiga’s platform – which says that “environmental preservation is a priority because we are the current executors of intergenerational environmental heritage,” without including any proposals – the party has tried to capitalize on a wave of student protests demanding government action to… Yes climate.
But he did it in a strange way: representatives of Chiga went to distribute leaflets against climate activism at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (FCSH) at Nova University, in Lisbon, and were booed by students, Nicolau Ferreira told us. The posts claimed to “deconstruct the climate crisis for nerds.”
“The topic of climate change is increasingly discussed in our societies and this allows these actors [partidos de extrema-direita] “They have taken a position in opposition to the majority of other parties that support, in one way or another, climate policies,” said Bernhard Forchtner, of the University of Leicester (UK), who has studied the relationship between the far right and communication globally. “In this sense, far-right parties are using the ‘climate issue’ to position themselves and give voters a somewhat distinct choice,” he added.
This action by Chega at FCSH is just the beginning of the far-right party’s intervention in this issue. Would we ever want to press “Rewind“, as happened with the elections of Javier Miley and Geert Wilders?
