The 2024 European elections have seen a great surge of the Radical Right in Europe, partly attributed to a so-called “greenlash” or “climate backlash”– citizens lashing out against green policies due to their financial burden (Patterson, 2023; Sengupta, 2024; Tasch, 2024). But in order to understand citizens’ climate change attitudes we need to consider elite-led opinion formation (Merkley & Stecula, 2021). Furthermore, political actors might act as catalysts of political backlashes (so called “backlash mobilisers”)(Alter & Zürn, 2020; Freedman, 2020).

This study adopts a mixed-methods approach to analyse the development of climate backlash rhetoric in the European Parliament (EP) plenary debates. Utilising an original dataset comprising of approximately 2,000 EP speeches on climate change between 2004 and 2024, this paper measures MEPs’ rhetorical engagement in backlash against climate change mitigation policies. It examines whether this rhetoric has supplanted earlier trends of climate change skepticism and whether just transition arguments have increased in response. Multinomial logistic regressions further explore individual-level and country-level factors driving these rhetorical shifts. This paper shows that climate-backlash-related rhetoric has been present in the EP since 2004 but increased during the 2019-2024 parliamentary period. Simulatenously, outright climate change denial and climate change scepticism have declined. However, there is a notable regional effect to take into account: whereas the Western European Radical Right might increasingly use climate change as a wedge issue (Dickson & Hobolt, 2024), the share of climate change sceptic arguments and climate backlash rhetoric has drastically decreased among Eastern European Radical Right MEPs.