A f D - CCC : Analyzing the Climate Change Discourse of a G erman Right-wing Political Party (2025)

Abstract: While the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change (CC) is undisputed now for a long time, public discourse is still divided. Considering the case of Europe, in the majority of countries, an influential right-wing party propagates climate scepticism or outright denial. Our work addresses the German party, which represents the second-largest faction in the federal parliament. In order to make the partys discourse on CC accessible to NLP-based analyses, we are compiling the, a collection of parliamentary speeches and other material from various sources. We report on first analyses of this new dataset using sentiment and emotion analysis as well as classification of populist language, which demonstrate clear differences to the language use of the two largest competing parties (social democrats and conservatives). We make the corpus available to enable further studies of the party’s rhetoric on CC topics.

## introduction in 2019, a study by a political consultation company analyzed the climate change (cc) policy agendas of 21 right-wing populist parties in european countries @xcite . interestingly, they found that the positions are not as homogeneous as one might think. the parties were categorized into these three types (p. 10 ff.): in group (3) there are three parties that acknowledge the problem and see a need for action, though this does not necessarily translate into ambitious goals for their national policies. 1 the biggest group is (2) with eleven parties, while group (1) consists of seven parties. in this paper, we address the case of the german alternative für deutschland ('alternative for germany'), for short afd. they belong to group (1) above, and have made their position rather explicit on many occasions. well-known are, for example, quotes from the afd mp steffen kotré, who said in november 2018 in the parliament that there is no scientifically-proven correlation between co 2 in the atmosphere and the temperature on planet earth. 2 in the 2025 elections, the afd captured 20.8% of the vote (exactly twice as much as in the 2021 elections). while climate change was not a prominent topic in the election campaigns at all, nonetheless the result indicates that a sizable proportion of the german public is sympathetic toward the denialist/skeptical position. for comparison, in a poll conducted by the major public tv station ard in december 2023 foot_2 , 62% of participants agreed with the statement that "germany is already doing a lot for climate protection; now it is time for other countries to move forward"; and 60% agreed with "in the climate debate, there is too much propagation of fear". the climate movement is well aware that new communication strategies are needed in order to bring the topic back on the political agenda these days. as a prerequisite, we believe that tracking the discourse of highly-influential right-wing parties is an (if small) contribution that nlp can make. for the case of germany, in this paper we present the afd climate change corpus (afd-ccc), a set of different types of documents that were in recent years issued by party officials, comprising political speech, social media posts, and miscellaneous documents. section 2 discusses the background and related work. then, in section 3, we describe the composition of the corpus. as a first use case, in section 4 we use both a lexicon-based and a transformer model to analyze populist language and a transformer model for emotions, and show that the afd results are quite different from the politicallycentral parties. section 5 draws some conclusions and discusses the relevance of our work for the notion of positive impact by means of nlp. ## data collection we constructed our corpus primarily from sources that are open to the public, and this material is what we are making available with this paper. 4 it consists of: in addition, for our analysis to be reported in the next section we drew on two sources of material that at this point cannot be made freely available: we filtered all texts for climate change topicality by using a set of keywords that @xcite had employed to build a german climatetext corpus (see sct. 2.1). filtering was done on the level of paragraphs, i.e., our final data set is a collection of climate-related paragraphs taken from larger documents. we opted for this approach as in particular the parliamentary speeches usually address many different topics, and we wanted to eliminate the non-topical material as much as possible. telegram channel posts required additional preprocessing. they were split into paragraphs and the text cleaned by removing emoticons and special characters, as well as promotional segments frequently found at the end of posts in some channels. our distribution of the afd-ccc provides both the original text of the paragraphs (with only telegram posts minimally cleaned for noise, as described above), and the tokenized text. additional metadata provided by the corpus includes the text's author (if applicable), the date of publication (or, in the case of speeches, the date of delivery), and a unique id. aside from the afd-ccc, for our analyses in the next section, we use texts from the two other ## analyses: languages of populism and emotion in a first use case of the afd-ccc, we address the question of the presence of linguistic features of populism and of emotions. for populism, our main instrument is the lexical approach by @xcite , and as a secondary method we check whether the popbert model @xcite yields comparable results. for emotions, we make use of the bert-based model by @xcite . additionally, we perform sentiment analysis using german-sentiment-bert by @xcite . ## conclusions summary. we have presented the afd-ccc, a corpus of texts produced by members (for the most part, mp's) of the german right-wing populist party alternative für deutschland, addressing the topic of climate change. the afd-ccc expands over five different text domains, a substantial part of which we make publicly available. the public corpus contains transcripts of political speeches in german and european parliaments, press releases, tweet ids, and telegram channel messages. the variability of the text sources allows for expansive studies of the party's cc-related rhetoric, both as it is communicated to the political body and to the public. to showcase the applicability of the corpus, we have further presented three first use cases, positive impact. times are difficult for the climate movement, because their topic is not among the top of the agendas of societies these days. in many countries, both politicians and the public mood are currently preoccupied with other crises and problems. but on top of that, in many countries, climate-skeptic or -denialist parties have gained significant influence, and even if climate is not one of their top priorities either, they do actively exploit the issue -together with other ecological concernsby framing it as an elitist project of people who lack connection with the "real problems" of the "real people". in this situation, which is to a large extent being shaped by social media communications but is also reflected in parliamentary debate, the cc movement has become aware that transmitting facts about causes and consequences of climate change will not be enough for changing the public mood to the better. instead, it has been argued, disseminating positive narratives that offer constructive steps toward solutions can be more successful. for building such narratives, it is important to first be aware of the thinking and reasoning of "the other side". influential right-wing parties, such as the afd in germany, are an important player there. having access to their opinions and arguments, and using nlp to analyze their materials at scale, can support the monitoring of climate-skeptical discourse, and thereby help in reacting to changes in attitudes and in building counter-narratives. afd-ccc is meant to contribute to this groundwork.