SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
The news all summer has been full of record-breaking heat waves, drought and wildfires in Europe.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: A fire emergency across Southern Europe, forcing 175,000 people to evacuate.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Red heat alerts have been issued in parts of Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and the Balkans.
PFEIFFER: Europe went through its fifth major heat wave of the year last week. That extreme weather is linked to human-made climate change and political parties are capitalizing on it, but maybe not the parties you'd expect. NPR's Ruth Sherlock explains.
RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: You might think that this extreme heat in Europe would drive public support to green parties and politicians pushing to solve the climate crisis.
TOBIAS GERHARD SCHMINKE: Right now, we're not really seeing this in the data.
SHERLOCK: Tobias Gerhard Schminke of Europe Elects, an organization that monitors political trends in Europe from Germany, says, in fact, the opposite can be true. Extreme weather events in recent years have been one factor boosting far-right parties and populists.
SCHMINKE: The radical right has been becoming stronger and stronger and stronger. And currently, we're looking at about 30% of voter support for radical-right parties across the European Union.
SHERLOCK: Immigration and a broader distrust in politics are key drivers for these parties' success.
CATHERINE DE VRIES: That's the core business, let's say (laughter), of populist, radical-right parties, but I think what they're doing is they're adding on the environmental layer.
SHERLOCK: Catherine De Vries, a political scientist at IE University in Spain, says having traditionally denied that climate change is human-made, many of these parties have quietly dropped that rhetoric. Instead, they attack climate action as, quote, "woke" policies imposed by scientific elites who want to dictate, for example, how much meat you can eat or what car you can drive.
DE VRIES: They talk about the people versus the elite. There has been this normalization of a discourse that it's us versus them, and that's a very, very explosive way for populist right parties to gain support and frame an issue in favorable terms for them.
SHERLOCK: During extreme weather events like the heat wave Europe is experiencing, analysts say these parties capitalize on frustration and fear voters feel by offering short-term fixes.
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JORDAN BARDELLA: (Speaking French).
SHERLOCK: In France this summer, the president of the country's far-right National Rally - the leading opposition party - Jordan Bardella, told local media the government was leaving citizens to suffer the suffocating heat, and promised to install millions of air conditioners despite experts questioning if the country has the energy capacity to cope.
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UNIDENTIFIED SPOKESPERSON: (Speaking Spanish).
SHERLOCK: In Spain, a spokesperson for the far-right-wing Vox Party blamed the vast wildfires on what she called climate fanaticism - environmental rules restricting logging and grazing that she says left brush that worsened the fire.
These right-wing strategies and critiques of governments can help win support. Nigel Farage's populist hard-right Reform Party that advocates for drilling for more oil and gas in the North Sea has been projected to win at the next election in parts of the U.K. most prone to flooding from weather linked to climate change. But, says Federica Genovese, a professor of political science at Oxford University, these approaches do little to solve the overall crisis.
FEDERICA GENOVESE: It's actually this paradoxical, OK, so we're going to do abundance - including abundance of air conditioning or abundance of money so the U.K. can pay your bill - by doubling down (laughter) on exactly the cause of all of this.
SHERLOCK: She says truly tackling climate change is far more complicated and often does require some sacrifice from voters. The challenge for parties who support green policies is how to win over those voters even as the climate crisis bites.
Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, United Kingdom.
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