Representing the radical right of the Grande Nation in the Grand Duchy: the viral ‘fortress Europe’, the contagious ‘borderless Europe’ and the non-communicable ‘cross-border regional Europe’

ABSTRACT

The European radical right has influenced the mainstream political agenda on extra-European migration with its election-winning ‘fortress Europe’ narratives. In parallel, it has shaped political alliances within a ‘borderless Europe’, with a view to representing a Europe of people opposed to a Europe of elites. The mass media have circulated this European right-wing radicalism, and academic research has been carried out concerning the motives behind this media representation. Nevertheless, this research has rarely taken into consideration whether the media associate the radical right with a key scale of the European construction: cross-border regions. The current article explores this potential phenomenon by analysing how the press in Luxembourg portray the French radical right, as Luxembourg and France share a cross-border region characterised by strong economic interdependencies. The results show that the media can be keen on representing the political destiny of the radical right in the neighbouring state in regional borderlands. However, the portrayed dynamics are not necessarily linked to cross-border regional integration itself. Commercial – and above all political – motives linked to other European scales can lead to the absence of the ‘cross-border regional Europe’ in the media agenda when the foreign, yet nearby, radical right is portrayed.

KEYWORDS:

• Populist radical right
• European integration
• mass media
• cross-border regions
• news framing

1. Introduction

The mass media in the European Union have portrayed the Eurosceptic and populist parties within national public spheres and at the level of the European parliament (FitzGibbon, Leruth, and Startin 2017; Gattermann and Vasilopoulou 2015). They have also circulated policies and events around alternatives to European integration (such as Brexit), supported by populist parties and putting at stake the whole European integration process (Bijsmans 2021; Bijsmans, Galpin, and Leruth 2018). A number of research projects have been carried out, examining the effects of and motives behind the media representation of these parties, especially the radical right ones that have the characteristic of combining people vs. elite antagonism, nativist positioning and authoritarian visions of power (Mudde 2017). Commercial and political factors are often viewed as key motives behind the media visibility of these parties (Ellinas 2018; Lamour 2019, 2021a; Mazzoleni 2008). However, it is rarely investigated whether the media associate the radical right with the building-up of cross-border European regions. These are areas located in-between nation states and characterised by multiple processes of integration, such as increasing economic interdependencies, deepened political partnerships and the development of local policies favouring a European sense of belonging.

The objective of the current research is to investigate the mass media in one country in terms of their interest in the Eurosceptic radical-right party in the neighbouring nation during political campaigns. We further look at whether this interest can be associated with the European cross-border region involving both countries. It is argued that cross-border regional Europe can be a scale considered by the mass media when they portray radical right parties from neighbouring states. However, the density of information associated with foreign parties and the framing of this news are not necessarily predominantly related to the regionalised integration, due to the commercial and political structuring factors of the news production being organised at other European scales. The current research is based on the portrayal of the Front National/Rassemblement National party from the French Grande Nation by the main newspapers in the Luxembourg Grand Duchy. Following a review of literature on the media representation of the populist radical-right parties in Europe – notably by paying attention to the motives behind it – the hypothesis, methodology and case study are described. We then present the results in two major parts. First, a quantitative content analysis, with the aim of uncovering potential nuances in the representation of the party over time and its connection with the European cross-border regional scale. Second, an investigation of the factors behind the representation of this party across borders in Europe, and its linking to different European scales. The article concludes with a discussion on the place given to cross-border regions in academic literature on the Europeanisation of national public spheres, and on the processes favouring (or not) the representation of this European scale by reporters, based on the selected case study.

2. Radical-right populism in the European media: The attractive motives across borders

The interest of the mass media in populist radical-right parties and leaders has been explained by two main motives: commercial and political (Ellinas 2018; Lamour 2019, 2021a; Mazzoleni 2008). From a commercial perspective, it can be noted that the economic model of the mass media over the past decades has become increasing fragile. This is due to competition among a greater number of media entrepreneurs, the development of news access for free and the growing dependence on commercial resources. These require more appealing and sensationalist content to attract the attention of an increasingly fragmented audience that can be ‘sold’ to advertisers. This context favours the populist radical-right parties, which have in their DNA the resources to interest audience-maximising mass media when reporters frame news – especially news about Europe (Bos, van der Brug, and de Vreese 2011; Lamour 2021b; Mazzoleni 2014; Moffitt 2015).

Framing is about selecting ‘some aspects of a perceived reality to make them more salient, thus promoting a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation’ (Entman 1993, 52). It appears that populist radical-right parties can meet the different parameters, securing their visibility in the framing of European-related news in a context of increased media competition for commercial resources. This can be seen when we pay attention to the different aspects of newsworthiness proposed by Eilders (2006), 1) Personification (the ‘who’ side of a story with populist radical right parties often having loud, charismatic and Eurosceptic leaders attracting attention). 2) Damage, or more generally negativity (the ‘problem’ or ‘what’ side of a story, with populist rhetoric based on the darker and sensationalist presentation of European issues, amplifying the sense of existing crises that can captivate the media interest). 3) Eliteness (the ‘problem solvers or those responsible for problems’, with populist parties scapegoating the Europeanised elite set against the nation-state people and presenting themselves as the solvers of the problems in the name of the people). 4) Influence and relevance (the ‘impact’ of the situation, with populist strategies consisting of portraying the European national peoples as the disfranchised losers from a situation). 5) Controversy (the ‘disagreement’ among different people intervening in the debate, with populist stakeholders making coarse and post-truth comments to secure their centrality in the debate). 6) Continuity (the recurrence of a situation, with populist parties eager to state that the neoliberal EU is again and again failing the European sovereign nations, as proved for instance by the management of the migrant crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic). 7) Geographical proximity (the ‘at home’ or nearby spatial influences, with populist narratives emphasising the ‘threat at the door’ or the ‘fifth column’ danger, requiring the development of a fortress Europe).

An indirect commercial factor potentially linked to political motives can also play a role in the representation of populist parties, leaders and viewpoints across the border when Europe is at stake: ‘media organisational imperatives’ (Shoemaker and Reese 1996). Some media can organise economic capital deals across state borders, and define shared cost-saving in the production of news. This can include a spread of Eurosceptic populist information across borders, as shown in the case of the British press exporting its Eurosceptic news agenda to Ireland (FitzGibbon, Leruth, and Startin 2017).

From a political perspective, four major parameters can explain the attraction of the populist parties and leaders – especially the radical-right ones – in the media to address issues involving Europe. The first parameter is the political agenda of media moguls, who can promote populist parties, leaders and their Euroscepticism in order to secure their own strength in the public sphere shown by the media. One can think about Berlusconi’s media empire favouring the neo-fascist party Alleanze Nazionale of Fini in the 1990s (Ellinas 2018), or the more recent support of the French Bolloré media group for the candidacy of the Eurosceptic and radical right reporter Eric Zemmour during the 2022 French presidential election (Bacqué and Chemin 2021). By contrast, in some rare countries, the media have put in place a ‘cordon sanitaire’ to prevent the spread of populist parties and leaders in the public sphere (de Jonge 2019); with the media having some importance in the destiny of parties when they are still marginal in politics (Ellinas 2009). The second parameter is the ‘life phases’ effect. The interest of the mass media in populist and radical right parties and their Eurosceptic narratives is linked to the changing life phases of political parties in the public sphere, with a potential period of decline following a phase of increased or stabilised presence (Esser, Stępińska and Hopmann 2017; Herkman 2017; Mazzoleni 2014). This life phase effect is correlated with a key journalistic routine when political life is addressed in electoral campaigns: the ‘strategic game framing’ of politics (with the presence of political losers and winners) rather than ‘issue framing’, implying more analysis of political programmes (Aalberg, Strömbäck, and de Vreese 2011; Cappella and Jamieson 1996). The strategic game framing of political information is only favourable to a populist party when its attraction to the citizenry is corroborated by positive opinion polls. This was for instance the case during the 2019 EU parliamentary election – a period characterised by the representation of strong radical-right leaders such as Viktor Orbán and Matteo Salvini (Mudde 2019; Rivera Escartin 2020). The third parameter is the ‘contagion’ effect; that is, the spread of populist support among European citizens across state borders, notably with the presence of populist parties joining forces in the EU by sharing positions and strategies, as proved among the radical-right parties (Caiani 2018; FitzGibbon, Leruth, and Startin 2017). These parties forge what can be termed a European ‘meta-populism’ (de Cleen 2017); that is, the development of a people vs elite antagonism beyond each nation state to portray their alliance and to secure their combined success. These alliances and the meta-populism across borders can exist at different spatial scales; for example at a major European scale, but also at a more regional, cross-border level (Lamour 2020a, 2021c, 2021d; Lamour and Varga 2020; Szalai and Kopper 2020). The fourth parameter is the European ‘power geometry’ effect. It is especially important to understand the interest of the media in a foreign populist radical-right party. The media attraction for foreign state news in general, and its populist forces in particular, is related to an unbalanced allocation of power among states at the international scale. Information about the populist forces in large European foreign countries such as France or Germany, especially if they share a border with the country where reporters and their public are found, is considered more newsworthy than stories from small and largely ignored states that are in the ‘media dark territory’ (Örnebring 2009, 5) of Europe, such as Cyprus or Malta. From an EU perspective, the power geometry effect is related to the perceived dominance of some states over others in the building-up of the European integration process.

Commercial and political factors justifying the mass media representation of the radical right in Europe are strongly related to geographical space. For instance, the commercially attractive, sensationalist discourse on ‘fortress Europe’ is based on the populist claim of external border hardening, whereas the portrayal of a ‘borderless Europe’, based on the contagious union of radical-right parties, conveys the idea of internal political border blurring. However, it is rarely investigated whether the mass media link the radical right to an important geographical scale of European integration: cross-border regions structured around economic interactions, political governance networks and localised European policies. Do the mass media in a country strongly affected by European regional integration portray the radical right party of the neighbouring state in relation to this cross-border scale during electoral campaigns involving this party?

3. Hypothesis, case study and methodology

It is hypothesized that the media in one country of a cross-border region can pay attention to the radical-right dynamics found in the state on the other side of a European border when electoral campaigns take place. However, this representation is not necessarily related to the cross-border regional integration in the making. The potential indifference towards cross-border regional Europe by the media when they represent the foreign, yet nearby, radical right can be interpreted as the result of combined commercial and political factors associated with other European scales; factors strongly determined by the positioning of the foreign radical right in a fortress and borderless Europe.

The investigation is based on the portrayal of the French radical right party Front National/Rassemblement National by the most widely circulated daily newspapers in Luxembourg. This France–Luxembourg case study is considered for two main reasons. First, the small Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is at the centre of a cross-border urban and economic region, with Greater Luxembourg taking in 197,000 commuters every day from neighbouring Belgian, French and German areas, but with half of them coming from France (Statec. 2021). The strongest regional economic interdependence is between the small and attractive Luxembourg and the larger, but still economically deprived French borderlands that have become mainly a residential area. These two countries are connected notably through a governance partnership to facilitate the daily migration of the French cross-border workers. Second, the French cross-border workers (in contrast to the Belgian and German ones) reside in an area where the populist radical right is particularly strong. The Front National (FN) of Marine Le Pen, renamed the Rassemblement National (RN) in 2018, is a major party in the French Lorraine region that neighbours Luxembourg and is plagued by long-term deindustrialisation. As a party claiming to represent the interests of a territorialized and sovereign nation against the agents of economic, political, and cultural borderless globalization, the Rassemblement National has developed a clear Eurosceptic agenda attracting a large share of the local electorate. This consists of condemning the EU’s integrative policies and multilateral political organizations, while suggesting that the European cultural identity should be based on its Greek and Roman political heritage and Christianity (Stockemer 2017; Vasilopoulou 2018). The popularity of the FN/RN has been increasing in the urban and deindustrialized margins of the French administrative Great East region including Lorraine (Fourquet and Manternach 2019). The possible arrival of this Eurosceptic party in executive powers of this French Lorraine and in the broader French Great East regional council would lead to a time of great uncertainty concerning the policies and the political governance of the Greater Luxembourg cross-border region as a whole; and especially the financing and management of cross-border public transport that allows a proportion of French workers to commute in Luxembourg. It is important to note that Luxembourg also has a right-wing populist party: the Alternativ Demokratesh Reformpartei (ADR). However, it is not as strong as the French FN/RN, and its positions are not as radical due to the economic and multi-cultural context of the Grand Duchy (Carls 2021).

The following four most circulated newspapers are considered in the analysis: The Tageblatt, L’essentiel, Le Quotidien, and the Luxemburger Wort.¹ The first three are owned by the publisher Editpress, which is connected with the center-left party LSAP (Lëtzebuerger Sozialistesch Aarbechterpartei) and the reformist trade union OGBL (Onofhängege Gewerkschaftsbond Lëtzebuerg). The fourth daily is published during the investigation by the editing company Saint-Paul, which has been linked to the Catholic church of Luxembourg and the Christian democrat party CSV (Chrëschtlech Sozial Vollekspartei).² The two publishers have commercial interest like any media even if their paid newspapers are subsidized by the state. As the country is small, all four newspapers considered here cover international affairs and economics, while also presenting local events, soccer results, and items such as road accidents. L’essentiel is a free daily newspaper, edited in French and attracting a multicultural, young to middle-age readership of residents (national and foreign) plus French-speaking cross-border workers (Lamour 2017). Its output is based on synthetic and factual news centered on Luxembourg (with a focus on mobility and economic issues). L’essentiel also has a smaller number of pages than the other papers considered in this article, with a greater presence of advertising. The three other print and paid dailies offer both denser and more often opinionated information on regional, national, and international topics for a middle aged and older readership, mainly of Luxembourg residents. Le Quotidien edited in French contrary to the German-written Tageblatt and Luxemburger Wort, is more embedded than the three others in the French-Luxembourg cross-border region, as its economic capital comes partly from the French group publishing the main newspaper found on the other side of the border, Le Républicain Lorrain. This capital connection enables Le Quotidien to reproduce articles printed in Le Républicain Lorrain, resulting in a common cross-border readership for some specific issues (Lamour 2021e).

The hypothetical-deductive methodology used in the current research consists of considering all print articles that mention the name of a French radical right party and/or its leader, and that were published during three elections. These are: the 2015 French regional council election, the 2017 French national parliamentary election and the 2019 European election. The choice of the three elections implies the potential election of FN/RN candidates (regional councillors, MPs and MEPs) based in the French area included in the cross-border region powered by the Luxembourg economy, and potentially making reference to this cross-border region. For each ballot, the research focus is on the newspaper editions of the selected newspapers for the last four weeks of the campaign and the first week after the election. Once these articles have been identified, a series of information were searched into them to investigate the evolving interest of the Luxembourg reporters for the FN/RN and three Europe-related news framing helping us to explore the commercial and political motives behind the news production: the ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘where’ of information.

- The first type of information helps to deepen the focus of reporters, depending on the elections: 1) major articles of at least a quarter of page and centered on the French radical right with references in the title, sub-titles, and/or the content of the article; 2) articles with quotations from the party representatives; and 3) articles with photographs of party representatives.

- The second type of information is used to investigate the first dimension of news framing related with Europe, the ‘problem’ or ‘what’ side of a story, meaning the type of European integration process evoked to structure the article’s argument: 1) articles with information on EU policies favoring the integration (e.g. the EU monetary policy, the EU migrant policy, the EU transportation policy); 2) articles with information on EU political organizations and governance, including references to EU institutions and governance parternership; and 3) articles with information on collective cultural identities associated with Europe (e.g. the Christian-rooted identity promoted by the radical right or the Muslim cultural identity presented by the radical right as a threat to the European identity).

- The third type of sub-category offers a way to research the second dimension of news framing related to Europe; the European ‘who’ side of the story, meaning the type of European stakeholders mentioned in the articles. The focus is on three types of actors, which are the main ones mentioned: 1) articles with references to right-wing populist parties outside France to consider the potential contamination effect across borders; 2) articles with references to non-populist parties outside France; and 3) articles with references to state-national governmental executive powers outside France and European institutions such as the European commission.

- The fourth type of sub-category enables us to approach a third dimension of news framing related to Europe; the European ‘geographical proximity’: 1) articles with references to the French Great East Region (and its territorial components, such as its cities) adjacent to Luxembourg; 2) articles with references to the cross-border regional and functional scale involving Luxembourg and its Belgian or German neighborhood; and 3) articles associated with the broader EU scale involving multiple states and/or Brussels-based authorities beyond the limits of the cross-border region involving Luxembourg.

Following a quantitative analysis of the broad tendencies in terms of news focus based on the previously mentioned information, an analysis of the commercial and political factors of the media representation is carried out in relation to the European space. First, an assessment of the overall political campaign environment in Europe during the selected ballots, to explore whether a European ‘power geometry’ effect could be instrumental in the evolving representation of the party. Second, an approach to the contextual European crises, potentially justifying a changing focus on French elections and populist forces. Third, an investigation of the following elements to reveal the potential priority of the ‘life phases’ and ‘contagion’ effects of populist parties and the correlated ‘strategic game framing’ of populist-related news: a) the title of articles that place greater or lesser emphasis on the struggle for power; b) the relative importance given to opinion polls and effective results rather than political programmes; and c) items repeated from one article to the next reflecting the strength of the party or its leader to win elections in relation to the European construction. For example, a focus on political alliances repeated from one day to the next, ongoing internal party disagreements, long-term contestation of the leaders, or court cases and their different phases.

4. The Front National at the frontier, the Rassemblement National across nations: the evolving grand duchy press attention paid to Le Pen’s party

A quantitative approach to examining the portrayal of the French populist radical right by the Luxembourg press first reveals the changing interest over time. Reporters circulated information related to the French party far more during the 2015 French regional elections. It also appears that this regional election was the time when the party was most related to the European integration process, particularly one key aspect of it: European policies. The French Great East region adjoining Luxembourg is mentioned in many articles, especially during the French regional elections; however, the Greater Luxembourg cross-border region involving the Grand Duchy is not the main European scale presented by the journalists. These tendencies can be explained by a changing combination of commercial and political motives from one election to the next in a transformed European electoral context.

4.1 The multi-dimensional focus on the 2015 French regional election

When one considers the editorial choices made by each of the four selected newspapers, some differences are apparent. For example, the paid-for daily Le Quotidien, has the highest number of articles mentioning the French radical right including all elections (86 items, 32,5% of the total), while the free daily L’essentiel shows the least interest in the party (35 items, 13,5%). The Tageblatt and the Luxemburger Wort newspapers have similar coverage, with respectively 74 (28%) and 69 (26%) articles. This overall situation reveals media organizational imperatives (Shoemaker and Reese 1996). The free daily L’essentiel has fewer pages and a strong commercial imperative, encouraging factual information on Luxembourg and entertaining items at the global scale. The aim is to consolidate its mass and multi-cultural audience, and it has limited space to present foreign politics or a specific party, although French cross-border workers are part of its readership (Lamour 2017). In parallel, the paid-for newspaper Le Quotidien, edited for a French-speaking public, is partly owned by a French editor and shares articles with the main French regional newspaper across the border: Le Républicain Lorrain. Accordingly, it benefits from an organisation and distribution context facilitating greater exposure of a French party – especially during the French regional elections – to a readership used to being informed about what is happening in nearby regional France (Lamour 2021e). However, this does not imply a cross-border media supporting views of Euroscepticism, in contrast to what can be seen in other case studies (FitzGibbon, Leruth, and Startin 2017).

In spite of the differences between the four dailies in terms of the number of articles concerned with the three cumulated ballots, they all decided to focus on the representation of Le Pen’s party during the 2015 regional election. As shown in Table 1 below, combining the news items from the four newspapers, more than half of those mentioning the party and/or its leader during the three elections were published in relation to the 2015 regional campaign. This proportion is even higher when we pay attention to major articles, articles with quotations from FN/RN representatives, or articles containing photographs of Marine Le Pen and other representatives of the party (Table 1).

Table 1. Le Pen’s party in Luxembourg’s press.

Elections	Year	All articles		Major articles		Articles with French radical right party quotations		Articles with photos of French radical right party leader and representatives
		N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
French Regional Council	2015	142	54%	74	81%	40	63%	34	72%
French National Parliament	2017	83	31%	12	13%	19	30%	9	19%
European Parliament	2019	39	15%	5	5%	5	8%	4	9%
TOTAL		264	100%	91	100%	64	100%	47	100%

Note: The four chosen newspapers published 142 articles on Le Pen’s party during the French regional election. This accounts for 54% of all the articles published about the party during the three election campaigns combined.

Further, 40% of the all articles mentioning Le Pen’s party over the three elections (103 items) evoke European integration in terms of policymaking, political organization, and/or the identity-building process. The 2015 regional election was the one during which reporters emphasized the connection between the party and Europe. The only exception is when one focuses on the link between the French radical right and the political organization of Europe, which is more apparent in articles published during the 2019 European parliamentary election (Table 2). The 2019 ballot was also the one in which Luxembourg’s press connected Le Pen’s party the most to other right-wing populist parties in Europe (Table 3), such as the German AfD (Alternative für Deutschland). However, this was less frequently the case with the Luxembourg ADR (Alternativ Demokratesh Reformpartei), which was mentioned only five times in relation to the FN/RN over the three ballots. This lack of connection with the Luxembourg right-wing populist party can interpreted as the result of the ‘cordon sanitaire’ put in place by the press towards populism located in Luxembourg (de Jonge 2019), and the somewhat ambivalent attitude of this party to European integration (Carls 2021).

Table 2. Le Pen’s party and European integration.

Elections	Year	Articles including any European integration issues		Articles including an issue linked to European policies		Articles including an issue linked to European political organizations		Articles including an issue linked to European identities
		N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
French Regional Council	2015	47	46%	32	67%	13	21%	13	62%
French National Parliament	2017	27	26%	7	15%	21	34%	3	14%
European Parliament	2019	29	28%	9	19%	28	45%	5	24%
TOTAL		103	100%	48	100%	62	100%	21	100%

Note: The four chosen newspapers published 47 articles on Le Pen’s party mentioning the European integration process during the French regional election. This accounts for 46% of all articles linking Le Pen’s party to the European integration published during the three elections campaigns.

Table 3. Le Pen’s party and EU political stakeholders.

Elections	Year	Right-wing populist parties and leaders in Europe		Non-populist parties and leaders in Europe		National goverments in Europe and European institutions plus their executive leaders
		N	%	N	%	N	%
French Regional Council	2015	5	14%	8	30%	16	34%
French National Parliament	2017	6	17%	4	15%	18	38%
European Parliament	2019	24	69%	15	56%	13	28%
TOTAL		35	100%	27	100%	47	100%

Note: The four chosen newspapers published five articles on Le Pen’s party, also mentioning other right-wing populist parties and leaders in Europe during the French regional election. This accounts for 14% of all articles linking Le Pen’s party to these political movements and leaders.

Lastly, in terms of an EU scale related to Le Pen’s party, we can note the marginal importance of the cross-border Greater Luxembourg. What matters for the reporters is to connect the party to the larger Europe. The French Great East region adjacent to Luxembourg is mentioned in a relatively large number of articles – especially those produced during the 2015 regional election – but its linking to the European cross-border area that also includes the Grand Duchy is rarely mentioned (Table 4). An analysis based on the approach to the European context of the elections and on the content of the articles helps us to explore the commercial and political motives behind the focus and the scalar choices made by the Luxembourg press in terms of representation of the French radical right.

Table 4. Le Pen’s party in a multi-scalar Europe.

Elections	Year	Reference to the French Great East Region bordering Luxembourg		Cross-border regional scale		Broader European scale
		N	%	N	%	N	%
French Regional Council	2015	61	77%	16	100%	35	38%
French National Parliament	2017	16	20%	0	0%	27	30%
European Parliament	2019	2	3%	0	0%	29	32%
TOTAL		79	100%	16	100%	91	100%

Note: The four chosen newspapers published 61 articles on Le Pen’s party, also mentioning the French Great East region. This accounts for 77% of all articles linking Le Pen’s party to this French region.

4.2 Le Pen’s changing newsworthiness: The resonating ‘fortress Europe’ discourse from France and the contagious ‘borderless Europe’ within the EU

The press in Luxembourg decided to focus more on Le Pen’s party during the 2015 regional election and to frequently relate it to European policies because of the centrality of this French ballot within the European electoral and societal contexts at the time. First, the 2015 regional election took place in the EU when France was the only major country organising an electoral campaign, thus making the French political issues very relevant in the neighbouring Grand Duchy. The other EU area where elections were taking place at the same time was in the ‘media dark territory’ (Örnebring 2009, 5) of Europe: Gibraltar. A strong power geometry effect can be seen, explaining the focus on France. Second, this election was organised just after an event of the type that routinely secures the parallel visibility of the radical right as a political party proposing radical and sensationalist policies related to such events: Islamist terrorist attacks. In the present case, this refers to the attacks that took place in Paris on 13 November 2015, resulting in the death of 129 people of different nationalities. Nevertheless, the media in Luxembourg do not support the French radical right. They tend on the contrary to criticise it, but they cannot ignore the controversial FN discourse from neighbouring France about the linking of terrorism, Islam and extra-European immigration from Africa/Asia. For instance, the press mentions the controversy around Marine Le Pen in December 2015 after she put photos of the beheaded European James Foley (who had been killed by the Islamist State) on her Twitter account. The press connect Le Pen to European policies, as the French leader and her party see the end of free circulation in Schengen Europe and the establishment of a fortress Europe as a remedy to tackle terrorism. From a newsworthiness perspective, the French radical right and its vision of the terrorist crisis, including the securitisation of borders and the end of the Schengen Treaty, can only attract the attention of the press in the neighbouring small Grand Duchy, the economic viability of which is 100% dependent on open borders.

One major political factor also explains the 2015 focus: the ‘life phases’ of political parties (Esser, Stępińska and Hopmann 2017; Herkman 2017; Mazzoleni 2014) and the correlated ‘strategic game framing’ of politics by reporters during political campaigns (Aalberg, Strömbäck, and de Vreese 2011; Cappella and Jamieson 1996). The 2015 terrorist attacks boosted support for the radical right among French citizens. The FN experienced an upward life phase in French politics, as shown in the many public opinion polls³ and effective results⁴ used by the press in Luxembourg. The presence of Le Pen’s party in the Luxembourg media is legitimised by its electoral support, and the reporters then emphasise the contests between the potentially winning FN and the potentially losing mainstream parties. This strategic game framing is visible in the choice of titles using metaphors (for example: ‘Regional election: The Front National has the wind in its sails’, ‘The sacred union [against the Front National] will not take place’ and ‘the Great East region holds its breath’), and the content of articles focusing on the potential success rather than programmes; – not to mention the high density of photographs presenting a smiling, fighting or satisfied Marine Le Pen and her followers or worried opponents.

In 2017, France organised its national parliamentary elections. It was still the only major country in Europe holding a ballot at that time, with only the small Malta also doing so. However, the upward life phase of the FN was halted a few weeks beforehand, during the French presidential election that was won by Macron. The FN is politically strong, but its support is stable among French citizens, hence the clear disinterest in the Grand Duchy. The Luxembourg press replicates the attitude of its French equivalent, and the newspapers in the Grand Duchy were accordingly keener to portray the young, winning and smiling pro-European Macron than the losing Eurosceptic Le Pen. There were fewer articles on the FN and these were still based on a ‘strategic game framing’ and less favourable towards the FN. The three most important topics repeated in many consecutive articles on Le Pen and the EU do not present the French radical right as a leading force in a fortress Europe agenda. First, the party is presented as weakened by the accusation of fictitious employment at the European Parliament in a series of news items. Second, the party is simply listed among other European right-wing populist movements. Third, dissent is mentioned between Marine Le Pen and the Vice-President of the Front National, Florian Philippot, concerning the position of the party on European monetary integration.

In 2019, the situation changed radically from the perspective of electoral campaigns in Europe, when all the EU states, large and small, were expected to elect their MEPs. There was consequently more election news to deal with, coming from powerful countries in the European Union, and less space for the visibility of the French radical right. From a newsworthiness and a commercial perspective, the RN and its standing sensationalist discourse on immigration, terrorism and Islam could still represent a value to attract the attention of readers. In 2019, however, due to the existence of opinion polls all over Europe showing the possible victory of the populist right in the European parliament (Mudde 2019), there was a change of the threat portrayed in the press. The RN’s sensationalist position, justifying the building of a fortress Europe, was partly replaced by the threatening build-up of a radical right in a borderless Europe. The key political factor impacting on the media coverage was the ‘contagion effect’ of right-wing populism across borders in Europe, with the presence of parties sharing the same oppositional narratives between the disfranchised European people contained in nation states, the incompetent or non-legitimate Europeanised elite and the threatening extra-European migrants. It was the contagion of a European ‘meta-populism’ (de Cleen 2017; Lamour 2020a) that had become relevant. The media interest in pan-European Eurosceptic populism at EU elections is not something new (FitzGibbon, Leruth, and Startin 2017). However, there was a change of level concerning the expected support for populist radical-right parties among EU citizens in Europe following the 2015 migrant crisis (Mudde 2017). Reporters in Luxembourg moved towards a European meta-level ‘strategic game framing’, with the potential winning of the European radical-right family contrasted with the potentially losing European mainstream left and right parties. This contagion effect did not directly concern Luxembourg, however, as there is a tacit agreement in the country’s media not to favour populism and sensationalism in the representation of national party politics where the Luxembourg ADR populist party remains marginal (de Jonge 2019). It is the ‘contagion effect’ in the EU at large, where Luxembourg is unique: both as a country having kept its dominant party politics representation around mainstream centre-right and centre-left political parties, and as a country electing a very small number of MEPs (six in total).

Le Pen’s party has been a strong French force in terms of MEPs in the long term, and this was the case in 2019. Nevertheless, there were only five major articles focusing on this party in the Luxembourg press for the 2019 European ballot, and actually none in the most circulated newspaper, the Luxemburger Wort. This lack can be explained by the fact that the RN and Le Pen were experiencing a stabilised life phase in the 2019 EU parliament elections, whereas two other radical-right parties and leaders were more able to attract attention, as they were in an ascendant phase in the EU: The Hungarian Fidesz of Viktor Orbán and the Italian Lega of Salvini (Lamour 2021a). In contrast to Le Pen, these other two leaders were not just politicians making sensationalist and antagonistic discourses, but two collaborating men in power who used radical and illiberal policies in their country to tackle the migrant crisis and were eager to export their solutions at the EU level (Rivera Escartin 2020; Toth 2020). Therefore, Le Pen was mainly presented by the mass media as a mere member of the populist family, and rarely as a right-wing populist dealmaker in a future EU parliament. She was also associated with another member of the ‘family’, who had suddenly become unpleasant due to a money-related scandal: Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of the Austrian Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ). The European political dominance and the represented political winners vs. losers dynamics are not simply contrasts between populist and non-populist parties, but also between populist parties themselves. The overall portrayal of Le Pen in the Luxembourg press as a potential winner, whether or not overshadowed by other European populist leaders, does not mean that journalists in Luxembourg avoided talking about the radical-right electoral programme. They did so, and even proposed causes to explain the support for this party. However, the stakes presented in the titles and the content of a great majority of articles are more about the ability of the Eurosceptic radical right to achieve a leading executive power in France or within the European parliament.

The French Great East region, which is included partly in the cross-border Greater Luxembourg, was focused on by the Luxembourg journalists when they mentioned Le Pen’s party. This was especially notable in the 2015 regional election, as shown by the quantitative analysis. Nevertheless, it is far less linked to the inclusion of this region into an economic Greater Luxembourg than to the potential win of the French regional executive power by the FN. The Great East regional focus was mainly determined by the French-contained and regionally-scaled ‘life phase’ of the FN, with the potential election of the man behind the successfully communicated relaunch of the party at the national level: Florian Philippot (Chrisafis 2017; Lamour 2021b). Then, once again, the reporters produced their information on the correlated strategic game framing of news with, for instance, the repeated focus on the increased likelihood for Philippot to be elected because of the unwillingness of the French regional socialist representative to withdraw his candidacy during the second run of the election. It is interesting to note that the journalistic news framing was radically different when reporters associated the French region with the European cross-border regional scale of the Greater Luxembourg. There was a stronger ‘issue framing’ than a ‘strategic game framing’ in a large proportion of the articles, meaning a greater emphasis on the FN’s political programmes and the effects of the French radical-right election. Two types of ‘issue framing’ are apparent: First, the irrelevant programme of the FN to manage the cross-border mobility of French workers employed in the Grand Duchy, and the broader cooperation programme with Luxembourg. Second, the difficult to imagine cross-border political governance at different spatial levels in Luxembourg, if the radical right had taken control of the French regional executive. This ‘issue framing’ implies that Le Pen and her followers can be at the centre of the newspapers articles, but with a dominant viewpoint of the Luxembourg political forces or cross-border institutions that will have to deal with a potential French radical-right power at the proximity scale. Nevertheless, this representation, which is relevant from the perspective of cross-border regional integration in Europe, is not often communicated because of the greater imagined newsworthiness associated with the fortress and borderless Europe agenda of the European radical right in the broader EU.

5. Conclusion: the hollowing-out of radical right populism in the Greater Luxembourg and the borderlands France of invisibles

The mass media circulated in each EU nation-state participate in the Europeanisation of their respective media-circulated public sphere by representing successful Eurosceptic radical-right parties, the difficulties of the European integration process and alternative EU policies (Bijsmans 2021; Bijsmans, Galpin, and Leruth 2018; Lamour 2021a). The representation of a damaged Europe can be accompanied by the links made by reporters between foreign radical-right parties and those in the country where the mass media and their public are located (FitzGibbon, Leruth, and Startin 2017; Lamour 2020a). Studies into this process have been generally based on case studies of large or medium-sized EU countries. Academics have rarely paid attention to what is taking place in small EU states such as Luxembourg, Malta or Cyprus that are generally located in the ‘media dark territory’ (Örnebring 2009, 5) of Europe. Furthermore, studies considering the radical right and the Europeanisation of the public sphere in EU states tend to ignore cross-border European regions as a relevant EU scale, although in these regions there can be a presentation of the radical-right Euroscepticism across borders (Carls 2021; Biancalana and Mazzoleni 2020; Lamour 2021c). This indifference can be justified in large and medium-sized countries, where European integration is not strongly dependent on economic and political integration processes located in Europe’s borderland regions. Nevertheless, it can be more relevant in the investigation of small states such as Luxembourg, in which economic sustainability depends on the European regional hinterlands. In the case of the Grand Duchy, this refers to Greater Luxembourg, where a large proportion of its resources are located in terms of the workforce and public services used by this workforce, although these are managed by neighbouring states.

The current research shows that the Luxembourg press, targeting mainly a readership based in the Grand Duchy, do not connect the French radical right to the cross-border economic region associating France and Luxembourg. The FN/RN parties are also rarely linked to the Luxembourg right-wing populist ADR party. There is a ‘hollowing out’ of the existing populism within the Greater Luxembourg, and this indifference is based on two parallel processes. First, the willingness of the Luxembourg media to maintain a ‘cordon sanitaire’, preventing the exponential visibility of the modest and ambivalent Luxembourg populist right in its public sphere (de Jonge 2019), whereas by comparison, the French media boosted the small FN party of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 1980s (Ellinas 2009). Second, Le Pen’s party is a national political group with an agenda structured on a collection of disfranchised nations claiming a fortress Europe and striking national populist alliances within the borderless Europe represented in the EU parliament. The radical right of the French Grande Nation has nothing to do with the Luxembourg Grande Région. Accordingly, the Luxembourg press associates the FN/RN with the broader Europe. It turns out that cross-border regional economic interdependencies, political governance and policies are not sufficient to structure a media agenda linking the radical right to cross-border regions, even though the control of political executives by the radical right could partly derail this localised European integration process. The meaningful representation for the media depends on the combination of commercial and political motives, and involves the attitude of journalists towards the populist forces of their respective countries and the attitude of neighbouring populist parties in a multi-scalar Europe. Therefore, we can expect that each cross-border regional context in Europe will lead to a different outcome in terms of media portrayal of the neighbouring radical right.

The Luxembourg press do not consider the votes of citizens in the French borderlands for the Eurosceptic FN/RN and associate them with Greater Luxembourg. They also do not investigate whether the European cross-border regional integration boosted by the Grand Duchy could have some responsibility for this massive vote for the FN/RN in French ex-industrial cities located at the border, such as Longwy or Villerupt. This indifference on the part of the press can be linked to the presence of a factor external to the media and the radical right: the strengthened and yet fuzzy border determined by European regional integration itself. Greater Luxembourg is divided between on the one hand, a prosperous Luxembourg centre, pooling exponential economic, human and cultural capital at the global scale thanks to competitive taxation (Lamour and Lorentz 2019, 2021), and on the other hand, a still partly derelict French periphery benefiting from the economic spillover of Luxembourg, but where there is an electorate of France-contained deprived invisibles excluded from the Greater Luxembourg’s prosperity they can see in their everyday life environment (Lamour 2020b). Some further investigation is needed to explore the use of the media by these European borderlands invisibles, and how this use can be included in their daily experience of the economic EU integration process they may feel excluded from. This would be a way to rescale the effect of the media on the spread of Eurosceptic populism within Europe.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund [INTER/SNF/18/12618900/CROSS-POP].

Notes

1. Articles in the print media are considered rather than online versions for the chosen publications, because the former has by far the largest readership. For example, the most visited newspaper website (Luxemburger Wort) attracts 16,000 daily users, while 142,500 people read its print version (TNS Ilres 2020).

2. Saint-Paul was bought in 2020 by the Belgian multimedia group, Mediahuis.

3. https://www.francetvinfo.fr/faits-divers/terrorisme/attaques-du-13-novembre-a-paris/elections-regionales-apres-les-attentats-le-fn-passe-en-tete-des-intentions-de-vote-au-premier-tour-selon-un-sondage-ipsos-sopra-steria-pour-france3_1193381.html

4. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/06/front-national-wins-opening-round-in-frances-regional-elections