How has climate politics become embedded in existing ideological conflicts? This paper examines how parties across Europe have politicised and framed climate change over the past three decades. Applying a transformer-based classifier and multilingual topic models to parliamentary speeches from 27 European countries (1990–2020), the study traces how parties link climate change to broader political agendas and ideological profiles. Rather than treating climate framing as movement along an autonomous denial-to-alarm dimension, I argue that parties refract climate change through the pre-existing cleavages that organise European party competition, emphasising the dimensions related to climate change on which they already enjoy reputational advantage. The analysis shows that the substance of climate discourse is ideologically structured, but unevenly so: the economic left–right cleavage patterns it most prevalent, with left-wing parties emphasising distributive themes and right-wing parties market-based instruments, while party internationalism is robustly associated with attention to multilateral governance. The cultural GAL–TAN cleavage, by contrast, leaves a fainter and less predictable imprint. The paper contributes to understanding the political structuring of climate change and the evolving role of parties in shaping Europe’s climate discourse.