Abstract
Among many challenges contemporary liberal democracies face, the ecological crisis plays a significant role because, according to environmental movements (Extinction rebellion, Degrowth movement), it has the potential to change the democratic order worldwide. Environmental movements address their demands to political, cultural or business elites with the distinguishable message to keep the planet habitable, and their demands are often radical and have a similar style to populists. This paper aims to analyse the structure of environmental populism as a theoretical political concept. The starting question is whether the world environmental movement is genuinely populistic.
Environmental populism has already been incorporated into the scheme of different populistic trends on the background of a left-right political axis (Buzogany and Mohamad-Klotzbach 2021); however, its inner structure is not clear. Environmental populism can be approached from different populistic theories. When populism is considered from the perspective of the ideational approach (Mudde 2017), environmental populism can merge with socialism that serves as a thick ideology. Post-structuralist approach (Laclau 2005), on the other hand, can be applied to environmental populism because such movements formulate precise demands and try to formulate the people that would help to contest the hegemonical formation represented by politicians and businesspeople. Environmental populism might be seen as a strategy to maintain power based on direct, unanimated, and non-institutional support from a large number of followers (Weyland 2017, Urbinati 2019). However, concerning all these approaches might be environmental populism always seen as partly insufficient. Firstly, environmental populists often do not want to merge with more "traditional" ideologies. Their political ambitions are to radically change their way of life and overcome traditional political ideologies (Hausknost 2017, Adaman and Devine 2017). Secondly, there is no certainty that "environmental people" will be formed around demand as a unifying and constituting element. Thirdly, environmental movements use anti-elite rhetoric to mobilise the people but usually lacks a strong leader who would seek or exercise government power and who maintain direct support from the people.
Therefore, the paper deals with three significant difficulties and suggests that changing the perspective more to a political style could solve such difficulties. The theory of populism as a political style (Moffitt 2016) distinguishes three traits of populism - appeal to the people versus elites, "bad manners", and usage of the rhetorical figure of breakdown, threat, or crisis. This paper describes how these traits can be assigned to environmental movements' politics. Moreover, environmental movements stand in a paradoxical situation. They most likely use populistic logic as a political style, politics based on struggle on the one hand, and on the other, they call for deliberative forms of political order that would overcome political struggle and deepen democracy by consent. This paper shows how environmental movements use a populistic political style and why it is the appropriate approach for further research about environmental populism, particularly regarding the problem of the environmental people.