Demonisation of political discourses? How mainstream parties talk about the populist radical right

Abstract

Academic research focuses on political communication of populist radical right parties and on their discourses about the political mainstream. Yet, we know less about how the political mainstream talks about radical right populists. Scholars assume a demonisation of populist radical right parties by the mainstream, which portrays the far-right outsiders as Nazis or fascists. This study assesses whether demonising discourses are indeed a common communicative element of Western European mainstream parties by analysing parties’ messages on Twitter in ten Western European countries during election campaigns. The findings indicate that demonising discourses are not as widespread as assumed in the literature but occur exclusively among some centre-left parties. In the article it is argued that historical contexts (experiences with fascist rule) and electoral breakthrough of radical right parties might explain why certain centre-lefts demonise their far-right competitors while others do not.

Keywords:

• Content analysis
• populism
• radical right
• mainstream parties
• demonisation

Disclosure statement

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1 Haselmayer (2019: 358) mentions different examples of negative campaigning. Parties might insult, detest or dislike political opponents or simply emphasise that they do not agree with them.

2 We collected Facebook posts from the Austrian mainstream parties in order to learn which social media platform parties are more prone to criticise political opponents. The centre-right refers only twice to the FPÖ on Facebook but 18 times on Twitter. Regarding the centre-left, it does so only once on Facebook and 49 times on Twitter.

3 Towards parties with at least 5 percent according to the election results.

4 In 2019, no relevant far-right party participated in the general elections.

5 The dictionary mainly consists of the name of the respective far-right party and its abbreviation as well as the name of the party leader (see also: Van Heerden and van der Brug 2017). The list of keywords is illustrated in the Online Appendix (A2).

6 For inter-coder consistency, all sentences coded by author one were coded by the student as well as the same amount of sentences not coded by the author (random sampling).

7 The independent sample T-test (for the national parties) showed that the mean of references to competitors on Twitter is slightly higher among (215) than in the centre-right (172). However, these differences are not statistically significant (p-value > 0.05).

8 Especially in eastern Germany the party is seen more as a moderate social democratic party and has been part (sometimes as leading force) of several coalition governments, even though, some Marxist currents are still active within the party (Hough and Keith 2019).

9 https://progressivepost.eu/spotlights/populism-tracker.

10 For Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Norway we had to refer to opinion surveys collected by ‘Politico’ (https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/).

11 Regarding AfD, PVV and FN, we used data from the 2017 wave (since elections were held in this year). For countries where elections took place after 2017, we selected data from the 2019 wave. For the UK and UKIP (election 2015) we refer to the 2014 wave.

12 https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/de/oeffentlichkeitsarbeit/presse/pm-20200312-bfv-stuft-afd-teilorganisation-der-fluegel-als-gesichert-rechtsextremistische-bestrebung-ein.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes on contributors

Jakob Schwörer

Jakob Schwörer is a PhD candidate and research fellow at the Institute for Political Science, Leuphana University Lüneburg. His research focuses on parties, populist and nativist communication of political actors in a comparative perspective. His latest work (together with Belén Fernández-García) examined religious dimensions in Western European party manifestos since the 1980s and was published in Party Politics. [[email protected]]

Belén Fernández-García

Belén Fernández-García is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. Her principal research interests lie in the area of political parties, populism, hate speech and disinformation. Her latest work (together with Jakob Schwörer) examined religious dimension in Western European party manifestos since the 1980s and was published in Party Politics. [[email protected]]