The green, green grass of the nation. A new far-right ecology in Spain

The far-right party Vox in Spain has undergone, together with other similar forces in Europe (Atkins & Menga, 2022; Forchtner, 2020; Moore, 2019; Swyngedow, 2022), an “ecological turn”. The article starts from the premise of the need to understand better the far-right parties’ discursive mechanisms and their engagement with environmental issues. Theoretically, we criticize the ideological and ontological approaches to the current wave of national populism; instead, we argue that the dominant form of authoritarian national populism is more usefully analyzed in terms of embodied narratives, metaphorical imagination, mythmaking, and affective intensification. Empirically, using discourse analysis (Laclau, 2005) and drawing on the affective turn in political ecology, first, we argue that Vox's eco-narrative is interpretable as a combination of national populism and biopolitical imaginary pitting a “culture of death” against the “culture of life”. Vox's key rhetorical mechanisms, we intimate, are hyperbolical metaphorization and rhetorical inversion, which intensify at two interconnected levels: fear and indignation concerning the degeneration of Spain, pride and hope regarding Vox's and its male hero's promise of salvation and the Reconquista of the Spanish way of life. Second, by mainly looking into representative policy areas (energy and water), we argue that Vox has systematically chosen the former in conflicts between capitalist interests and environmental issues.