Vaia and the Ballot Box: When Environmental Disasters Benefit the Right

On the night between October 28 and 29, 2018, Northeastern Italy was struck by storm Vaia, an extreme weather event that felled over 40 million trees, caused prolonged blackouts, and inflicted damages exceeding two billion euros. Images of the ravaged mountains spread across the country, and the connection to climate change was immediate: local and national media referred to it as “tangible proof” of the climate crisis. Renowned mountaineer Reinhold Messner declared: “Before the storm, we could delude ourselves that climate change was a distant issue. (...) Something that happens elsewhere. Not anymore.”

In one of Italy’s most economically developed areas, with high levels of environmental awareness, it looked like the perfect opportunity for a boost in support for green parties. But the election results tell another story. Seven months after the storm, in the 2019 European elections, it wasn’t the Greens or the Five Star Movement that gained votes, but the hard-right Lega—then the regional governing force and co-leader of the national government.

Climate change and voting: two competing forces

Political science literature offers two opposing hypotheses to explain voter behavior following natural disasters:

• The environmental effect: an extreme event heightens concern for the environment and strengthens the green vote.
• The response effect: effective crisis management by the government earns voter rewards, regardless of ideology.

A study by Simone Cremaschi and Piero Stanig, from the Department of Social and Political Sciences at Bocconi, tests these two hypotheses using a particularly telling case. And the results, soon to be published in The Journal of Politics, may be surprising: the rescue effect clearly outweighs the environmental one. Storm Vaia benefited the Lega, despite its climate skepticism and opposition to the Paris Agreement.

The strength of the numbers

To causally separate the storm’s effects from pre-existing political trends, the authors employ a rigorous difference-in-differences model. The core of their method compares voting trends between neighboring—and very similar—municipalities that were differently affected by the storm. The intensity of the damage is measured using satellite data and on-the-ground surveys, integrated with administrative maps and municipal-level electoral data from European elections between 2004 and 2019.

To this dataset, Cremaschi and Stanig add information on post-Vaia reconstruction funding, to examine whether financial aid influenced electoral behavior. The results are consistent: in the most affected municipalities, the Lega gained up to 3.3 percentage points, while support for the Greens and Five Star Movement did not significantly increase.

The effect is stronger in municipalities that received more funds and holds even when accounting for socio-economic variables, placebo effects, and territorial spillovers.

A (seeming) political paradox

The study offers a clear lesson: environmental disasters do not automatically result in a shift toward environmentalism. Even in economically advanced and climate-conscious regions, political response depends on the identity of the actors involved. Where green forces are weak or seen as lacking credibility, disasters may instead reinforce the dominance of parties that deny or downplay the climate crisis.

“Voters support a party based on the perception of its competence in distributing benefits.” — Cremaschi & Stanig, 2024

It’s a pattern the authors describe as “ambivalent”: disasters open space for public reaction but can also solidify support for those already in power—especially if they are able to turn the emergency into an opportunity for visibility and resource distribution.

Focus on immediate consequences over long-term prevention

Stanig and Cremaschi conclude that even exceptionally severe events plausibly linked to climate change do not necessarily lead to greater support for environmental policies. Precisely because they involve severe emergencies, these situations tend to generate collective expectations centered on managing the aftermath (regardless of which political side is in power) rather than on preventing similar events in the future.

Simone Cremaschi-Piero Stanig, “Voting and Climate Change: How an Extreme Weather Event Increased Support for a Radical-Right Incumbent in Italy”, forthcoming in The Journal of Politics