Non-equilibrium diffusive systems are known to exhibit long-range correlations, which decay like the inverse 1/L of the system size L in one dimension. Here, taking the example of the ABC model, we show that this size dependence becomes anomalous (the decay becomes a non-integer power of L) when the diffusive system approaches a second-order phase transition. This power-law decay as well as the L-dependence of the time–time correlations can be understood in terms of the dynamics of the amplitude of the first Fourier mode of the particle densities. This amplitude evolves according to a Langevin equation in a quartic potential, which was introduced in a previous work to explain the anomalous behavior of the cumulants of the current near this second-order phase transition. Here we also compute some of these cumulants away from the transition and show that they become singular as the transition is approached, matching with what we already knew in the critical regime.