Societalizing the Energy Crisis: How Germany and Austria’s Far-Right Delegitimized Support for Ukraine After February 24, 2022

This chapter examines how the far right in Germany and Austria responded to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine of February 2022 by societalizing the ensuing energy crisis. Ratherthan addressing the war as a breach to European values, and a fundamental realignment ofrelations between Eastern and Western Europe, far-right actors depicted rising energy pricesand inflation as breaches to national values, in particular industrial power in Germany andneutrality in Austria. Through a process of societalization – the dramatization of institutionalproblems into moral crises threatening society at large –, economic strain was transformed intoa collective moral grievance, allowing far right actors to redirect public anxiety away fromUkraine and toward domestic narratives of decline. The chapter demonstrates how the relevantparties mobilized existing cultural codes of economic power, national independence, and anti-EU sentiment to delegitimize support for Ukraine. It argues that civil sphere theory must moredirectly engage with the cultural framing of economic crises, especially in times of polycrisis,where certain actors infuse material disruptions with symbolic meaning to underminedemocratic cohesion.