Extreme-right communication in Italy and France: political culture and media practices in CasaPound Italia and Les Identitaires

ABSTRACT

Although the media are ascribed much power in discussions about far-right politics, to date the communicative dimension of extreme right mobilization received little rigorous scholarly attention. To address this gap, this paper addresses the media practices of the extreme right, offering an empirical study of two emerging social movement organizations of this area: CasaPound Italia in Italy and Les Identitaires in France. Rather than treating them as incidental beneficiaries of media populism, the paper disentangles the various ways in which these groups interact with the mass media, discussing the forms and meaning of their activism in relation to extreme right political culture, and differentiating between inward-oriented and outward-oriented media practices. Based on ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews with far-right militants, the paper shows that media practices not only try to respond to the demands of the media environment in which the groups are embedded, but also seek to reinforce the groups’ internal organization and hierarchy, building collective symbolic imagery, and ensuring ideological consistency among activists and sympathizers. In so doing, the paper offers initial insight on how protest movements of the extreme right consolidate their profile and become recognizable in the public sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Extreme right
• media practices
• social movements
• Italy
• France

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Pietro Castelli Gattinara is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Research on Extremism, University of Oslo, where he leads a comparative research project on the far right and collective action against migrants and refugees in Europe. He has authored The Politics of Migration in Italy (Routledge, 2016). His work on the far right, migration politics, and mobilisations in the electoral and protest arenas has appeared in international journals including Comparative European Politics, Acta Politica, and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations.

Samuel Bouron is associate professor at the University of Paris-Dauphine. His work focuses on the relationship between the far right and the media. He wrote « From Fascists in the Street to Heroes on the Web. The training of Identitaires Militants » (Réseaux, 2017/2, n°202–203, pp. 187–211), based on participant observation within the network “Génération identitaire”, which shows the impact of this organization in the far-right group’s mobilization on Internet.

Notes

1 The article refers to ‘far right’ as an umbrella concept including extreme and radical organizations located at the right end of the ideological spectrum (e.g. Mudde, 2007). Within this broader category of actors, the two organizations under study are extreme right, in that their ideologies oppose democratic principles and ultimately aim at subverting the democratic order. This sets them apart from other radical right actors who are simply hostile to liberal democratic principles but subscribe to the rules of parliamentary democracy.

2 With the ‘cultural turn’ of the social sciences, culture has come to represent a growing domain of research in the field of social movements, including studies on framing and collective identities (for an extensive overview of the many existent cultural approaches and their shortcomings, see: Ullrich et al., 2014).

3 The Nouvelle Droite (New Right) is a prominent political stream of Europe’s right-wing thought. Originally developed in France in the 1960s, it opposes liberal democracy, multiculturalism and the mixing of different cultures (Bar-On 2012).

4 As for the cross-national comparison, Italy and France are generally considered to belong to similar clusters of media systems (Hallin & Mancini, 2004; Brüggemann et al., 2014, p. 1057).

5 Movimento Sociale – Fiamma Tricolore is a neo-fascist party started by members of the pre-existing Italian Social Movement who refused to accept the moderate turn imposed on the party in the early 1990s (see: Ignazi, 2003).

6 Founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972, and led by his daughter Marine since 2011, the National Front is one of the most influential populist radical right parties in Western Europe.

7 Unité Radicale was a French national-revolutionary group founded in 1998 and dissolved in 2002 after the failed assassination of President Jacques Chirac by one of its members.

8 For further details, see: Albanese et al., 2014; Bouron, 2015.

9 We are not suggesting that the structure of the web portal shapes the group’s offline organization. On the contrary, we believe that the influence between organization and media technologies is most likely mutual, and that both owe to the group’s worldview and political culture.

10 The websites of the neo-fascist Forza Nuova and Lealtà-Azione now follow this design.

11 In this respect, scholars of communication use the concept of ‘media logic’ to indicate the set of codes and rules that define the production of media content (Altheide, 2004).