Nativism and Democracy in the Populist Radical Right during the Pandemic

• In Event: Causes and Consequences of the Far Right in Europe

Abstract

This paper aims to illuminate the paradox inherent to the populist radical right’s discourse on immigration at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. As the first lockdown measures began to ease in June 2020, the Italian populist radical right leaders Matteo Salvini (Lega) and Giorgia Meloni (Fratelli d’Italia-FdI) staged a street march in Rome sporting Italian-flag-patterned masks, while the official celebration of the foundation of the Italian Republic was underway. Meloni and Salvini’s march manifested their abrasive criticism of Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic. In doing so, the populist radical right portrayed themselves as the saviours of democracy. At the same time, the march took on a nationalist flavour, reflecting the nativism intrinsic to the populist radical right’s protection of the rights and freedoms of a group of selected people ethno-culturally defined. The relationship between populism and democracy is fraught with tensions and has attracted vast scholarly attention. The anxiety-filled Covid-19 pandemic provided fertile soil for the combination in the populist radical right of nativism driven by misinformation on immigration, envisioned as a threat, with arguments in favour of liberal democracy against an allegedly authoritarian management of the pandemic. In which ways did the populist radical right manage to stick together calls for democratic rights and freedoms of the people with the negation of such rights and freedoms for a certain group of people? The case study of Italy, denominated ‘the land of populism’, yields important insights regarding the unwieldy combination of anti-democratic and pro-democratic discourse in populist parties across Europe at a time when the continent anxiously faced an additional threat against which to fight, i.e. the Covid-19 pandemic. In doing so, this paper contributes to the growing literature on anti-immigrant attitudes in populist parties during the pandemic, as well as to the established literature on the interactions between populist parties and democracy.

Theoretically, this paper draws on theories on liberal democracy and on populist parties at a time of crisis. Methodologically, this paper applies qualitative discourse analysis to a novel set of interviews with Lega and FdI representatives, and the analysis of the parties’ TikTok, Facebook (FB), and Twitter posts on the government’s management of the pandemic during the first year of the pandemic. FB has been widely used by Lega and FdI and reaches out to a wider share of potential voters than Twitter, while TikTok has been recently trending in these parties’ discourse. The argument is that in the first year of the pandemic, the so-called ‘civic discourse’ underpinning the populist radical right became the pillar of its political messages. Nativist traits were preserved and enhanced by the populist radical right, but they became increasingly cloaked under a democratic discursive façade. Such democratic façade rested on brittle foundations constituted by the fragile bonding of an exclusionary attitude, underpinned by misinformation, towards immigrants with calls to promote the rights and freedoms of the native Italians.

Author

• Marianna Griffini, King’s College London