AfD-CCC: Analyzing the Climate Change Discourse of a German Right-wing Political Party

While the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change (CC) has long been undisputed, public discourse is still divided.Considering the case of Europe, in the majority of countries, an influential right-wing party propagates climate skepticism or outright denial.Our work addresses the German party Alternative fr Deutschland, which represents the second-largest faction in the federal parliament.In order to make the party's discourse on CC accessible to NLP-based analyses, we are compiling the AfD climate change corpus, 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.