Framing Exclusion in the Public Sphere: Far-Right Mobilisation and the Debate on Charlie Hebdo in Italy

Abstract

While the January 2015 Paris terrorist attacks presented a crucial opportunity for far-right mobilisation, the focus on liberal democratic values and Charlie Hebdo’s non-conformist progressive profile presented challenges for right-wing discourse. Taking Italy as a paradigmatic case of public controversies on cultural and religious affairs, this article examines the opportunities and constraints generated by multicultural crises for far-right framing choices. A qualitative frame analysis analyses the discourse of three types of far-right actors. While the populist radical right, extreme right, and ultra-religious right groups disagree on crucial criteria for outgroup exclusion, they collectively employed the Charlie Hebdo controversy to redefine their exclusionary discourse on liberal grounds with the goal of gaining legitimacy in the mainstream public sphere.

Keywords:

• Far right
• Charlie Hebdo
• frame analysis
• public sphere
• multiculturalism
• Lega Nord
• CasaPound
• Forza Nuova

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the reviewers and editors of South European Society and Politics, as well as Caterina Froio, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. I also wish to thank Donatella della Porta and the team working on the Charlie Hebdo Project at COSMOS: Andrea Felicetti, Konstantinos Eleftheriadis, and Georgia Mavrodi.

Notes

1. This series of attacks, initially referred to as the ‘Paris attacks’, were later identified as the ‘January 2015 Île-de-France attacks’, to avoid confusion with other terrorist events in 2015 and 2016. In this paper, I use the terms ‘Charlie Hebdo attacks’ and ‘Charlie Hebdo debates’ without in this way intending to demean the importance of other attacks that took place between 7 and 9 January.

2. What came to be known as the ‘Mohammed cartoons crisis’ originates in September 2005, when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed, with the stated goal of opening a debate about the compatibility of Islam with secular democracy. As Danish Muslim organisations objected to the depictions by petitioning the embassies of Islamic countries and the Danish government, the issue grew into a global crisis, receiving prominent media attention and leading to protests across the world.

3. The ERC Advanced Grant Project Mobilizing for Democracy was funded by the European Commissions’ 7th Framework Programme, under grant agreement number 269136. Full information is available at www.cosmos.sns.it.

4. As can be noted, the number of statements and events retrieved for the ultra-religious right is somewhat lower than the figures reported for the radical and extreme right, respectively. While this is arguably linked to the limited mobilization potential of the ultra-religious right in Italy (both online and offline), the analysis provided here does not offer sufficient leverage to speculate on this finding in quantitative terms.

5. Buonismo, which I translated here as ‘do-goodism’ is a recurring concept in Italian far-right politics. The term is used derogatorily to refer to political correctness, and to the behaviour of people willing to help society by championing oppressed minorities through philanthropic or egalitarian means. Do-gooders are accused of imposing a progressive agenda on issues such as gender equality and multiculturalism while at the same time denying free speech to anyone who does not share this political paradigm.

6. In far-right discourse, the term ‘homosexualism’ is used to mark a difference between homosexuality as a behaviour (which is tolerated by most groups, at least publicly), and the indoctrination of the homosexual lifestyle, especially among children.