When COVID-19 circulates in right-wing populist discourse: the contribution of a global crisis to European meta-populism at the cross-border regional scale

ABSTRACT

The success of European Right-Wing Populist (RWP) parties is related to a context of crisis, offering the opportunity to mobilize antagonisms between the people, the elite and a series of ‘others’ . Studies have been carried out to find out how populist parties have reacted to COVID-19 in Europe. However, it is still unknown whether these parties have used the pandemic to intensify a European ‘meta-populism’; that is, a European upscaling of the antagonistic discourse involving people-centred in-groups and elite/others-related out-groups. The current article explores how representatives of RWP parties located in three different states (France, Germany and Luxembourg), but in the same European cross-border region (the Saar-Lor-Lux area), mobilized COVID-19 to potentially structure a European meta-populism. Following a broad analysis of the discourse on COVID-19 produced on each side of the border during the initial phases of the pandemic (February to August 2020), the research is based on a Critical Discourse Analysis of characteristic narratives. It is shown that in such a context, the virus became an integral element of a European meta-populist discourse. However, the identity of the European in-groups and out-groups can be different across borders. These different entities can also be associated with different European spatial scales.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• right-wing populism
• European regions
• borders
• scales
• critical discourse analysis

Introduction

COVID-19 arrived in a European context characterized by growing support for Right-Wing Populist (RWP) parties, setting the people against the elite and promoting a return to state sovereignty implemented by stronger border control. The ensuing pandemic, which was dealt with by different segments of the elites (public institutions, politicians, scientists, businesses, mainstream media, etc.), affected the whole of society and crossed state borders. It represented a crisis that RWP stakeholders could mobilize to circulate their oppositional narratives involving elites and the people, or their support for border control, with the goal of increasing their popular support within state-bordered democracies. However, the pandemic has shown that these parties can develop different attitudes to COVID-19. These attitudes depend on the parties’ position as a political opposition eager to politicize the issue or as an executive power keen on depoliticizing the issue (Bobba and Hubé 2021; Casaglia and Coletti 2021). It is also apparent that some populist leaders controlling governments have used the presence of COVID-19 to justify accelerating the dismantling of the rule of law and a distancing from EU multilateralism (Mudde 2020; Walker 2021).

Analyses of the attitudes of RWP parties and leaders in Europe concerning COVID-19 have been generally based on state-scale case studies. However, Europe is organized around multiple spatial scales, including cross-border functional regions involving segments of different states connected with one other by functional interdependences (for example cross-border employment basins). RWP parties exist – and can even thrive – on different sides of these cross-border functional regions. In parallel, right-wing populism strongly attached to state-bordered nationalism or regionalism can be a meta-level ideology, cross-cutting state borders in Europe. This involves parties and leaders forging alliances around a shared meta-populism or transnational populism (De Cleen 2017; Lamour 2020; Moffitt 2017), meaning an up-scaling to the European level of antagonisms between the ‘positive’ European sovereign-state people against a negatively-defined and Europeanized elite, promoting threatening globalization in terms of politics, economics and culture and serving the interests of endangering ‘others’ such as migrants. Therefore, can we say that RWP representatives who are located in the same cross-border region characterized by functional integration have mobilized COVID-19 to articulate a common European meta-populism? It is hypothesized that the European cross-border functional region is a scale for co-present RWP parties defining a meta-populism in relation to COVID-19. However, we can expect that variations exist across the border, with regard to both the identity of the opposing groups and their location in the European space, as the electoral fortune of each party and political personnel depend on contextual parameters that are not necessarily determined within European cross-border regions.

Our hypothesis is tested by considering the populist discourse circulated in one of the most integrated cross-border region of the EU: the Saar-Lor-Lux area, which combines the small state of Luxembourg, the French region of Lorraine and the German region of Saarland. Following a review of the literature on RWP in Europe from an ideational perspective, the hypothesis, methodology and case study are presented. The results are structured in three main parts. First, we investigate the COVID-19-related populist antagonism produced in each part of the Saar-Lor-Lux functional region, with a focus on the European in-group across state borders, supported by RWP parties. Second, the analysis aims to explore in greater depth the out-group presented by RWP parties in connection with the pandemic. Critical discourse analysis is used to assess similarities and differences in the production of populist opposition involving in-groups and out-groups. These two discussions are followed by an analysis of the spatial positioning of these in-groups and out-groups in a multi-scalar Europe, exploring RWP political strategies in the EU, within and across borders.

1 Right-wing populism in Europe: flexible antagonisms and malleable, people-centred discourse on border control

RWP has been studied from different perspectives including a political-strategic approach focused on the relationship between the leader and the masses (Weyland 2017), a socio-cultural approach investigating it as a discursive style (Ostiguy 2017) and an ideational approach considering populism as a thin-ideology with limited scope of conceptualization compared to more robust ideologies such as nationalism (Mudde 2017). From an ideational perspective, which we adopt in this article, populism is defined by an antagonism between an exclusionary and positively-defined in-group of ‘people’, and an ‘elite’ out-group, whose policies are both detrimental to the people and supportive of external, threatening ‘others’ (such as migrants) putting at risk the existence and cohesion of the people. As suggested by Laclau (1977, Laclau 2005), populist discourse is based on the mobilization of ‘empty signifiers’, such as ‘people’ and ‘elite’, to which can be associated elusive words, evolving ideas and interchangeable identities. These depend on strategic opportunities to maximize possible popular support in a given democratic context. The different sub-groups and identities aggregated in populist discourse behind the empty signifiers ‘people’, ‘elite’ or ‘others’ form antagonized ‘chains of equivalence’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 144). The different elements of these chains of equivalence keep their particularity (Laclau 2005, 79). However, they are bound to one another through a logic of simplification and negativity, dividing the social horizon in adversarial groups: the ‘chain of equivalence’ of people is determined by the sense of frustration and threat shared by all its components with regard to the attitudes and actions of the entities forming the elite ‘chain of equivalence’, but also the chain of equivalence of ‘others’. Populist party representatives and their allies integrate themselves into the ‘chain of equivalence’ of people frustrated/stigmatized by the elite and the ‘others’.

In RWP discourse, the ‘people’ can represent different groups, alternatively and successively. First, different representations of the commoner (the worker, the farmer, the small businessperson, etc.) whose cultural, economic and/or political interests are presented as looked down on or endangered by the elite or the ‘others’ (for example foreign workers). Second, the homogenous cultural community associated with a given territory such as Europe, the nation or the regional heartland (for example the Europeans, the French, the Germans or the Flemish people), but also a large segment of society within them (for example women), whose way of life, identity and cohesion are threatened by the policies of the elite who support the identity of ‘others’ (for example sexual or religious minorities). Third, the political community (for example British citizens) whose general will should be the source of democracy, which is instead confiscated by a political and economic establishment that also favours the rights of ‘others’ such as minority groups and migrants. The elite as an out-group is also divided into different segments, but with less cohesion than the people (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013). It includes entities such as political parties, the media, large and/or global businesses, intellectuals, bureaucrats or ‘Eurocrats’, ruling national governments, dominant foreign states or international multilateral institutions such as the UN or the EU Commission, except of course when such entities are controlled by or promote RWP ideas, policies or personnel (Lamour 2021a, 2021b, 2022a). The ‘others’ opposed to the ‘people’ and supported by the ‘elite’ comprise the stigmatized and faceless out-groups, presented as endangering the people, in turn defined as commoners, a homogenous cultural entity or the ultimate source of democracy (Lamour 2021c).

Populism comes at a specific time in history when a section of the political elite feels there is an opportunity to produce a people-centred hegemonic discourse to gain popular support, while existing hegemonic discourse has entered a phase of dislocation due to a structural crisis (Laclau 1977). The growing support among citizens for RWP parties in contemporary Europe comes in the wake of two successive crises. First, the 2008 global financial crisis, which led to a decade of austerity hitting the less affluent segments of society hard. This crisis also struck at a time when neoliberal economic globalization had constituted the hegemonic discourse of dominant left-wing and right-wing political parties and economic decision-makers over the past decades. Second, the 2014–2016 refugee crisis, characterized by poor cooperation among European states that showed the weaknesses of existing EU treaties (such as the Schengen Treaty) intended to deal with such problems (Theodore 2019). These two crises offered an opportunity for some RWP parties to contest the European ‘relativization of scale’ (Jessop 2000, 343), or the factual undermining of the state-national scale that has taken place since the 1980s and has seen the political and economic decision-making power of the nation state undermined. In its place, there has been a constant, fluid and complex reshuffling of political and economic activities at multiple spatial scales by interacting and struggling power holders with no dominant geographical levels. This relativization of scales over the past 40 years has been associated with uneven development (Brenner 2019), and socio-economic ‘losers’ seduced by populist discourse discussing their political, economic and cultural marginalization and promoting the idea of ‘taking back control’ (Norris and Inglehart 2019).

The contestation of the relativization of scale by RWP parties has consisted of seeking a return to the nation state. This particularly relates to sovereign state border control, which would protect against threatening migration (including workers from neighbouring regions or nearby states, refugee flows from different continents, etc.) or the loss of vital internal resources (for example deindustrialization). The negatively-defined elite are then presented as those responsible for facilitating or being unable to prevent these cross-border flows. The people to be protected from the arrival of the threating flows or from the loss of vital ones are also located at a specific scale within a bordered state. They are generally situated at the state-national scale, as the RWP parties electoral destiny is most often determined by a national popular vote. However, they can also be scaled at the regional level when the power of RWP parties is based on regional electoral support, as shown in Belgian Flanders, Italy and Swiss Ticino (Albertazzi, Giovannini, and Seddone 2018; Biancalana and Mazzoleni 2020; Jagers and Walgrave 2007; Lamour 2020; Vercesi 2021,).

The border control narratives of RWP parties at the state scale in Europe are as malleable as the production of the people vs. elite antagonism. It is not the multi-purpose and complete closure of a border that matters, but the selective type of border control used to provoke the people vs. elite/others antagonism (Lamour 2019, 2021b, 2022a; Lamour and Varga 2020; Szalai and Kopper 2020). This selection is determined by the value placed on the flows (human, economic, information, etc.) emanating at a given national/foreign scale (local, regional, national, European or global) and used as a source of frustration for the people located at the scale taken as ‘the primary avenue to power’ (Smith 1995, 62) for RWP parties: the bordered state-regional or most often the bordered state-national scale where their political power is grounded through elections (Lamour 2022b). By positioning themselves against the relativization of scales over the past 40 years, with a malleable border control discourse, RWP parties have entered into the struggle over the construction of a scalar agenda in Europe. This power struggle has become an integral part of what can be termed a European meta-populism or transnational populism (De Cleen 2017; Lamour 2020; Moffitt 2017), which is the shared antagonistic discourse opposing the transnational archipelago of a European people to common enemies across state borders such as the liberal European elites. Meta-populism is an ideational background, allowing European state-bordered populist parties to co-operate with one another around a dual scalar agenda: the primacy of each sovereign state/regional scale and the necessity of shared European border control to stop the external flows threatening the people of Europe.

COVID-19 reached a European continent characterized by strong RWP parties eager to encourage various antagonisms between the people and the elite, and malleable border control narratives to overcome complex multi-scalar crises. European cross-border functional regions – born out of the relativization of scales and the multiplication of cross-border flows (Jessop 2003) – comprise a specific scale where the Coronavirus is an issue that has been politicized by RWP representatives. What can the politicization of COVID-19 in these regions tell us about the building of a European meta-populism?

2. Hypothesis, case study and methodology

We make the hypothesis that European cross-border functional regions are a spatial context in which the politicization of COVID-19 by RWP parties can lead to a shared antagonistic discourse across the border, forming a common ideational background for a European meta-populism/transnational populism (De Cleen 2017; Lamour 2020; Moffitt 2017). However, nuances are expected to exist across borders with regard to the entities forming the chains of equivalence of ‘people’, the ‘elite’ and the ‘others’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 144). These nuances can be explained by the differentiated use of the global pandemic to maximize the RWP parties’ electoral attractiveness within state-contained democracies organized at the regional and/or the national scales; that is, their respective ‘primary avenue to power’ (Smith 1995, 62). The shared meta-populism discourse of RWP parties in Europe can be structured against the ‘relativization of scales’ (Jessop 2000, 343), but is not expected to necessarily result in a unique scale, specifically the state-national one.

This hypothesis is tested by considering a key relevant case study to investigate populism in European cross-border regions born out the ‘relavitization of scales’: the Saar-Lor-Lux area, crosscutting France, Luxembourg and Germany. This area includes the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the French region of Lorraine (now included in the broader French Great Eastern region, combining Alsace, Champagne and the French Ardennes) and the German region of Saarland. Saar-Lor-Lux is one of the historic laboratories of European construction in terms of institutional and functional integration. It currently constitutes one of the most integrated European regions from an economic perspective, with the presence of more than 200,000 workers residing on one side of the border (mainly in France, but also in Germany) and working on the other side (mainly in Luxembourg, but also in Germany). In parallel, the French side of the Saar-Lor-Lux region was a European epicentre of the Corona virus pandemic in the winter-spring of 2020 when a series of EU member states decided unilaterally to close their borders. Nevertheless, cross-border co-operation existed to treat French patients on the other side of the border due to the saturation of the French health care system. Later in the pandemic, the Saar-Lor-Lux region was a European testing ground concerning the ability for cross-border workers to move freely so as to prevent damage to cross-border economic regional integration (Medeiros et al. 2021). The Saar-Lor-Lux region thus exemplifies both the vulnerability of the cross-border regional Europe in a context of international crisis, as well as the resilience of EU member-states to coordinate their efforts to prevent the end of a cross-border regional Europe.

RWP parties are present on all sides of the Saar-Lor-Lux region. The discourse of the following parties is analysed in this article: the Rassemblement National (RN) in Lorraine, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Saarland and the Alternativ Demokratesch Reformpartei (ADR) in Luxembourg. All three are nationally-scaled populist parties, but they are included within states characterized by different scalar political regimes, with a German federation where strong political, legislative and financial powers are allocated to regions (Länder) and French and Luxembourg being unitary states, where executive regional authorities and assemblies have far fewer powers (Benz and Zimmer 2011; Cole 2011; Cole et al. 2021; Dumont, Kies, and Poirier 2011). It should also be noted that Luxembourg is somewhat distinctive from France and Germany in terms of scale, residents and citizenry. First, its nation state is a ‘local state’, completely incorporated in a cross-border region in which vital resources are located, including workers who secure the functioning of the country’s economy. Around 43% of Luxembourg’s labour force (that is, around 200,000 people) commute to Luxembourg each day for work, while residing in bordering countries (Statec 2020). This is not the case for France and Germany, which are less dependent on such cross-border resources. Second, 47% of the Grand Duchy’s resident population are foreigners; nearly 300,000 people who come mainly from other European countries and who have been attracted by Luxembourg’s competitive service economy (Lamour and Lorentz 2019; Statec 2021). France and Germany, and most of the other EU countries, have far fewer foreign nationals in their territories, and the majority are not from other European states. Third, Luxembourg is quite distinctive among other EU member states in terms of its citizens. For many years, the Grand Duchy has been the European country with the highest proportion of foreigners acquiring national citizenship (9.1 per 1000 in 2019 compared with 6.2 for the second highest EU country, Sweden) (Eurostat 2021). Some 80,000 people acquired Luxembourg citizenship between 2009 (the introduction date of the law allowing double citizenship) and 2020. This group currently represents nearly a quarter of Luxembourg’s citizens. It is somewhat of a structural change, especially as the Grand Duchy is one of the only EU states where voting is compulsory. No other country in the EU has experienced similar dynamics affecting the democratic state. Furthermore, these new citizens do not necessarily live in the country, as the government has decided to allow citizenship to people resident abroad, as long as one of their ancestors held Luxembourg citizenship in 1900. For instance, only half of the people acquiring citizenship in 2020 reside in the country. Most of the French and Belgians who have acquired citizenship over the past decade – respectively the first (16,000 people) and third (14,000 people) largest groups – do not live in the Grand Duchy (Statec 2021). Last, the booming economy of Luxembourg in recent decades has led to an exponential growth of housing prices and the departure of Luxembourg citizens. They have settled in the neighbouring regions, especially in Germany, where housing is more affordable. These people commute daily to their country of origin for professional reasons (Wort 2021). Luxembourgers are consequently a community that can include a multiplicity of cultural, political and territorial groups due to the citizenship policy of its government together with the economic attractiveness of the country and its side effects.

The support for the three RWP parties is variable. Surprisingly, it is in Lorraine that the RN achieves among its best results in France. This is a paradox, as it is the part of the Saar-Lor-Lux area where the citizen-workers are the most dependent on localized European integration, yet it has the highest electoral support for RWP parties against EU integration. The German AfD and the Luxembourg ADR show lower support, but they can resonate with their fellow citizens on some specific occasions, for instance during the 2015 Referendum in Luxembourg, when a majority of Luxembourgers voted against the possibility for residing foreigners to elect the national parliament; the ADR being one of the few Luxembourg parties vehemently opposed to this proposal. The French RN and the German AfD are clearly radical-right parties, to a different degree mixing populism with nativism and authoritarianism. The Luxembourg ADR is less openly associated with radical-right populism, although some its leading figures do not hide their support for European radical right populist parties, such as the PiS of Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland and the Fidesz of Viktor Orbán in Hungary (Carls 2021).

Each cross-border region is characterized by a specific institutional context and functional situation. However, Saar-Lor-Lux provides a good case study for examining RWP antagonisms and ‘chains of equivalence’ during a pandemic and within a cross-border European region. The methodology and results can be used as a basis to analyse other cross-border regional case studies in the European Union. To answer our research question and test our hypothesis, we selected texts that use COVID-19 as a politicized issue and that involve European (de)bordering processes (closure, control, opening of borders). These texts were produced by the previously mentioned parties between February and August 2020. They include discourse produced or circulated by RWP politicians located in the region. Different sources of information were used to build a textual database (the websites of parties and the social media used by the main politicians of each party). The size of each original text taken into consideration varies, such as long parliamentary discourses or short Facebook posts. However, the analysis has been carried out through the coding of short textual segments that contain a coherent argument and that range in length from a few sentences to a paragraph. In total, our database includes 97 texts (26 for the ADR, 34 for the AfD and 37 for the RN). By politicization, we mean the inclusion of COVID-19 into the political debate, with the presence of RWP parties using the pandemic to structure both international and antagonistic people vs the elite and others ‘chains of equivalence’. For each text, two types of parameters were encoded in a MAXQDA database: First, the entities constitutive of the people (in-group), and the elite/the others (out-group) constitutive of opposite chains of equivalence. Second, the geographical scales associated with the in-groups and out-groups, with the goal of exploring the position of parties concerning the ‘relativization of scales’ and the claimed return to the primacy of the state-regional/national scale. The issue of border control (in what way should the border be controlled, by whom, for how long, against which threats, etc.) is analysed paying attention to the opposing in-group and out-group.

Following a synthesis of RWP narratives based on MAXQDA, a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is carried out on specific RWP texts to explore how the different political parties represent in-group and out-group communities constitutive of a European meta-populism. CDA is used as a key analytical framework to investigate populist discursive antagonism (Van Dijk 2013). As the identification of the in-groups and out-groups is carried out with MAXQDA, CDA is then used to explore two major dimensions of the RWP parties’ use of dissimilation (the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’) and assimilation (the definition of sameness): 1) the predication, meaning the labelling of the contrasted in-group and out-group, and 2) the argumentation; that is, the common sense proof of this labelling organized around topoi (Richardson and Wodak 2013; Wodak 2015).

3. COVID-19 as a resource for a European right-wing meta-populism within a cross-border functional region

Europe is at the centre of an RWP discourse produced on the German, French and Luxembourg sides of the Saar-Lor-Lux region in relation to COVID-19. The RWP parties participate in the building of a European meta-populism structured around a ‘people’ in-group vs. an ‘elite/others’ out-group located beyond the border of each state. However, differences exist concerning the links constituting the ‘chains of equivalence’ of the people and the elite/others, as well as the spatial scales associated with the different representations of in-groups and out-groups. This differentiated European meta-populism across the border can only be explained by the dynamics of RWP parties and personnel within the specific political contexts found on the different sides of the Saar-Lor-Lux region.

3.1 We, the people of Europe: a borderless pandemic as the basis of differentiated inclusion across borders

In our selected case study, the RWP parties provide different referents for the ‘people’ in-group, often revealing the presence of a European meta-populism. These referents tend to be associated with the people as a cohesive cultural and sometimes ‘sovereign’ group; that is, the broadest possible vision of the ‘people’. There is an absence of European people portrayed as ‘commoners’ – which is often emphasized within nation states – in favour of identifying with the losers from globalization, namely the middle and working classes who have not benefited economically (Norris and Inglehart 2019). In each case examined, such ‘commoner’ identification takes more the form of local businesses. We also note that the type of cohesive cultural/sovereign European community is different in each region (Table 1).

Table 1. The most strongly affected groups when COVID-19 is politicized by the Saar-Lor-Lux RWP parties

		In-group		Out-group
		Categories	%	Categories	%
	RN (Lorraine) N = 37	European peoples	22	European Union	34
		Nation state	16	Emmanuel Macron	12
		French people	14	French national government	7
		RN	13	Migrants	7
		Local/French businesses	12	China	6
	ADR (Luxembourg) N = 26	Luxembourg people	49	Luxembourg national government	35
		ADR	13	European Union	15
		Cross-border workers	7	Germany	11
		Local/Luxembourg businesses	5	Cross-border workers	11
		Nation state	4	Foreign/multinational companies	8
	AfD (Saarland) N = 34	German people	24	European Union	16
		Local/German businesses	19	Angela Merkel	15
		AfD	12	Migrants	12
		Saarland	10	German national government	10
		Nation state	7	China	5

Note: ‘European peoples’ are represented as an ‘in-group’ in 22% of the encoded texts circulated by the representatives of the RN in Lorraine

The most strongly affected groups when COVID-19 is politicized by the Saar-Lor-Lux RWP parties

First, we can note the willingness of the RN in Lorraine to mention the existence of European peoples as non-French in-groups. These people are presented as being frustrated by European policies. Two dimensions of the ‘people’ are associated with them: From a political perspective, they should be the source of European politics as a sovereign people (the ‘Europe of nations’ discourse), while from a cultural angle, they possess the rooted identity the European project should be based on (the ‘European civilizationism’ discourse). As suggested in the speech shown below, the antagonism is structured around the topoi of threat and salvation involving the European Union and the people. The EU is labelled negatively, with incremental criticism: first it is incompetent and second it is conspiring against Europeans (‘behind the backs of the people’) to reduce the peoples’ sovereignty with a ‘federalist agenda’ for damaged economies. This is the topos of threat. By contrast, the state, the nation and the people (in a plural sense), plus the common civilization are the different links in the same people-centred chain of equivalence; links bound to one another around the topos of salvation. The state and the nation are protectors, the people identify with the protecting nation and the civilization will ‘help’ a new EU structured around the protecting nations. The ‘we’ (European peoples) is structured in this discourse around the singular and plural use of the nation, the state and the people.

It [The European Union] failed to anticipate and manage this crisis and then manoeuvred behind the backs of the people to push its federalist agenda and the interdependence of over-indebted economies. Confronted with the coronavirus, only the states protected their populations. For it is the nation that protects. It is the Nation that people continue to identify with, against all odds. The European Union must be re-founded to become a Europe of cooperation between sovereign nations. It is our common civilisation that will help us to rebuild it. (RN Meurthe and Moselle, 10 July 2020)

On the Luxembourg side, two other European types of people are present in the RWP narratives. The first is the ‘Luxembourg people’, which can combine different types of meaning in the specific context of the multinational Grand Duchy (Statec 2021). The Luxembourg ‘people’ can take four meanings. First, the spatially and culturally-rooted Luxembourgers living in the country, speaking Luxembourgish in their daily life (the central Frankish dialect used in the Grand Duchy) and giving the political personnel to the country. Second, the resident population composed of roughly 50% (mainly European) foreign residents and 50% Luxembourg citizens. Third, the Luxembourg citizens expatriated in the cross-border region due to the unmanageable housing price in their country of origin. Fourth, the more cosmopolitan population having access to Luxembourg citizenship since 2009 due to their ancestry, but living abroad: for example mostly the French and Belgian ‘new born’ Luxembourgers.

The second European referent of a ‘people’ in-group is not defined by its residential or electoral specificities, but by its occupational and spatial characteristics: cross-border workers in the Saar-Lor-Lux region, who commute daily across European borders for employment in Luxembourg. However, cross-border workers can be an in-group or an out-group, depending on their being perceived as a European community indispensable for the functional organization of Luxembourg, or for instance as a group potentially carrying the coronavirus with them. As suggested in the following quote, cross-border workers are not labelled negatively, but associated with two separate ‘topoi of number’: the topos of the massive number of mobile employees in the cross-border functional region to be dealt with (but not banned) by Luxembourg, and the topos of the increased, but indefinite number of infected people in the border region where French cross-border workers reside. Interestingly, the ADR quotes the German Robert Koch Institute to legitimize the second topos; the same institute that provided advice leading the German federal state at the time to close the border with Luxembourg and not France.

The question is also acute as to how Luxembourg is to cope with the 200,000 cross-border workers who come to Luxembourg every day from a number of different countries [in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic]. A particular focus is on the 100,000 French cross-border workers who come to Luxembourg every day from the Great East region. The Robert Koch Institute [in Germany] has now declared this to be a region in [health] crisis. It is particularly problematic that a large number of people can come to Luxembourg from an area characterized by an increased number of infected people. (ADR Press Release, 9 April 2020)

This ambivalent capacity to include a European in-group, outside the national ‘we’ and located in the cross-border regional environment, also exists in the discourse of the AfD, but less frequently than in Luxembourg. The following text helps us to grasp this ambivalence, which is structured around the ‘topos of reality’. On the one hand, there is a European ‘we’, including the ‘French’ and the ‘neighbours’, introduced by the pronoun ‘our’. This internationalized ‘we’ is labelled through suffering (the statistics for deaths) and the friendship connecting its regional territory (Lorraine) to Saarland. On the other hand, there is the ‘other’, represented by France and French state apparatus labelled negatively for its handling of the pandemic (‘weaknesses’ and ‘grievances’). This poor handling is used to justify the border closure, which was decided by Klaus Bouillon (the German Home Office Minister of Saarland), to prevent the spread of the virus. The topos of reality used by the AfD is structured in three phases: justified cross-border solidarity, legitimate border closure and short-term border re-opening ‘if things go well’:

Our French neighbours were also badly affected. 27,500 dead. The weaknesses of the French health system but also of the state’s organisational structures came to light. Our help for our neighbours on the other side of the border was therefore a matter of course. But also because of the grievances in France, the border control measures of our Interior Minister Bouillon were absolutely necessary and appropriate and certainly one of the reasons why we have so far got off lightly. If things go well, the border controls will be forgotten in a few weeks. Despite some prophets of doom, the traditionally good relations between Lorraine and Saarland will not be damaged. A friendship must be able to withstand that. (Bernd-Georg Krämer, AfD, 26 May 2020)

3.2 Capturing the virus in populist discourse: the shared links in the out-group chain of equivalence

The ‘European Union’ – in this context meaning European institutions such as the European Commission, but also individuals representing the EU, including the president of the Commission, Ursula van der Leyen – is the common link in the chains of equivalence of elite/others structured by the three RWP parties in the Saar-Lor-Lux region. It always appears as the first or second most frequently mentioned entity of the antagonized out-group (Table 1). The European Union is accused of being incompetent or not legitimate in dealing with the global COVID-19 crisis from a health perspective. It is also criticized for its promotion of Eurobonds as a way to overcome the economic side effects of the pandemic; a policy that would increase the loss of nation-state sovereignty, but also lead to increased European federalism (for example the Europe of nations), detrimental to RWP conceptions of ‘us’.

A collection of other links are associated with the European Union to form an EU-associated elite/others out-group chain of equivalence. We can note a shared link in the ‘Saar-Lor’ ensemble: the head of the state-national executive having given over state sovereignty to the EU and favouring broader globalization. German and French RWP representatives respectively place great emphasis on the scapegoated executive leaders of their respective countries, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, who are figureheads of the EU and its recovery plan following COVID-19. The two parties structure the same type of discourse around two topoi: the topos of consequences and the topos of burdens. The topos of consequences is multifaceted. It is associated with the realm of the European democracy, which is imperilled as a consequence of the EU recovery plan, but it is also associated with the economic wealth of the French and German people that will diminish as a consequence of EU-wide solidarity. The topos of burdens involves state-contained in-groups (‘France’ and ‘German tax payers’) who will be losers due to the policy of the European out-group, personified by the two negatively-labelled executives (for the RN, Macron does not listen to the will of the French people; for the AfD, Macron and Merkel are portrayed as ‘gravediggers’). The AfD introduces a third approach: the EU plan will not work, and as a consequence, the EU will be destroyed. The EU policies of Macron and Merkel should be rejected, because they are a burden to the people and because European states (indirectly representing the people) will not agree to share the burden. If it is not rejected, Europe will consequently ‘explode’.

15 years after the French rejected the European Constitution in the 2005 referendum, Emmanuel Macron is about to take another leap forward in European federalism by supporting the introduction of a European tax! To tackle the coming economic crisis, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel have proposed a massive European recovery plan worth hundreds of billions of euros, much of which will be added to the current EU budget. In addition to constituting a new burden, in the long term, for the states contributing the most to the European Union’s finances (France in the lead), new ‘own resources’ will soon be introduced. (Jean-François Jalkh, RN, 5 June 2020)

Merkel and Macron are the gravediggers of democracy in Europe! There is only one thing ‘historic’ about this summit: never before has a head of government fought so long and persistently to be allowed to give away her citizens’ tax money to others on such a grand scale as Angela Merkel did to Brussels. […] Chancellor Angela Merkel is once again pursuing European policy against the interests of German citizens and taxpayers in order to be celebrated as a ‘great European’. In fact, she has put the fuse on the explosive charge that will tear the European Union apart. No member state will be willing to pay the debts of the others in the long run. (Alice Weidel, AfD, 22 July 2020)

Two other shared links in the out-group chain of equivalence directly symbolize the frustrating and uncontrolled globalization encouraged by the European Union in the French and German RWP narratives: ‘China’ and extra-European ‘migrants’. These out-groups are both a source of and a factor in virus circulation in Europe, but are also scapegoated entities associated with economic globalization: China is criticized as controlling the manufacturing of much-needed health products in the EU, such as face masks, while the influx of economic and illegal migrants will increase the burden on European economies made fragile due to COVID-19. Once again, the Luxembourg ADR stands out. It mentions foreign and global companies as an out-group, but in contrast to the RN and the AfD, it also often directly condemns Germany; a country located in the Saar-Lor-Lux cross-border region. This criticism relates to Germany’s decision to unilaterally close its border with Luxembourg. It can be seen as a way to organize an out-group chain of equivalence associating a European state (Germany) with the broader European Union integration process (‘Schengen Accords’), which is labelled by its negatively connoted bureaucratic dimension (‘procedures’, ‘articles’, ‘legal bases’ and ‘international agreement’). In the current text, we can see the chameleonic dimension of populist discourse. The ADR representative is an advocate for European integration, but to better underline its irrelevant institutionalized and multilateral dimension, with one large state deciding unilaterally to close its border against all the existing EU legal provisions:

To what extent and in what way did the German measures in the context of the Corona crisis affect the existing rules, particularly in the context of the Schengen agreements? What procedures were followed here, what articles were invoked and what other legal bases were used? How did the government react to the fact that the border regime with Germany was changed unilaterally almost without warning? What does the relevant international agreement provide for in this context? (Fernand Kartheiser, ADR, 23 April 2020)

3.3 The COVID-19 variant discourse against the relativization of scale in Europe: searching for the primary avenue to power and its background

The consideration of the different spatial scales associated with the RWP politicized discourse on COVID-19 in the Saar-Lor-Lux region shows that all three selected parties have in common a claim for the return to the primacy of the state scale when addressing issues associated with most in-group and out-group communities. The importance of this scale is normal, as all three RWP political parties attach political legitimacy to a ‘people’ associated with the state territories. However, it is apparent that different scales can also be mentioned in RWP discourses (Table 2). The global scale is often presented as the spatial level associated with problems and threats initiated, unmanaged or favoured by the out-group, or experienced by the frustrated in-group and frustrating out-group. The broad European scale is more mitigated as a scale where incompetent EU institutions and Europeanized nation states act against the interests of European peoples or businesses.

Table 2. Spatial scales associated with the COVID-19 politicization by the Saar-Lor-Lux RWP parties

	In-group						Out-group
	Categories	Scales (%)					Categories	Scales (%)
		Region	Saar-Lor-Lux	State	European	Global		Region	Saar-Lor-Lux	State	European	Global
RN (Lorraine) N = 37	European peoples	0	0	25	53	22	European Union	0	0	26	54	20
	Nation state	0	0	48	39	13	Emmanuel Macron	0	0	52	30	17
	French people	0	0	47	26	26	French national government	0	0	60	10	30
	RN	6	0	50	25	19	Migrants	6	6	28	22	39
	Local/French businesses	27	0	40	7	17	China	0	0	23	31	46
ADR (Luxembourg) N = 26	Luxembourg people	0	21	45	18	16	Luxembourg national government	0	32	41	12	15
	ADR	0	10	70	20	20	European Union	0	0	31	63	6
	Cross-border workers	0	88	12	0	0	Germany	0	100	0	0	0
	Local/Luxembourg businesses	0	16	50	16	16	Cross-border workers	0	88	12	0	0
	Nation state	0	0	50	50	0	Foreign/multinational companies	0	25	50	0	25
AfD (Saarland) N = 34	German people	0	0	45	29	26	European Union	17	0	34	40	9
	Local/German businesses	21	0	38	29	13	Angela Merkel	14	0	45	24	17
	AfD	17	6	33	17	28	Migrants	0	0	44	12	44
	Saarland	21	14	29	29	7	German national government	21	0	38	25	17
	Nation state	12	0	50	25	12	China	9	0	36	18	36

Note: The ‘state’ scale is present in 25% of the encoded texts mentioning the in-group ‘European peoples’ for the RN. The highest percentages are highlighted in dark grey; percentages within 10 points from the maximal number are highlighted in lighter grey. The ‘region’ scale means Lorraine for the RN, regions within Luxembourg for the ADR and Saarland for the AfD. The ‘state’ scale means France for the RN, Luxembourg for the ADR and Germany for the AfD.

Spatial scales associated with the COVID-19 politicization by the Saar-Lor-Lux RWP parties

One can also note the relative importance of the regional and Saar-Lor-Lux scales, primarily for Luxembourg and Saarland. These two scales are different, as the AfD in Germany mentions its region of Saarland while the ADR in Luxembourg promotes the Saar-Lor-Lux cross-border region. The mention of these different regional entities reveals that RWP populist discourse is shaped by different political contexts. On the one hand, there is the structural political regime imposed by state law in Saarland, where the German federal system makes regions the primary avenue to power (Benz and Zimmer 2011). The AfD supports a German Vaterland, but its access to major executive power can also be conceived within the powerful regional Länder, a scale that is complementarity to the German Vaterland. On the other hand, in Luxembourg there is the context of European functional integration across borders, born out the relativization of scale over the past decades (Jessop 2003). The ADR supports a sovereign Luxembourg. However, the party cannot ignore the Saar-Lor-Lux region, because of the small size of the Grand Duchy and its dependence on this cross-border economic region involving 200,000 cross-border workers, Luxembourg citizens/voters who settled on the other side of the border to access more affordable houses, the Luxembourg government whose long-term economic policy is responsible for the functional integration, or a German state with a COVID-19 border control policy that could derail this functional integration. Luxembourg is the scale of power for the ADR, but the Saar-Lor-Lux region is the unavoidable Grand Duchy hinterland to be mentioned when politicizing COVID-19.

The French RN completely ignores the Saar-Lor-Lux regional scale and mentions Lorraine less frequently than the AfD mentions Saarland when structuring in-group vs. out-group antagonism. These two choices can be explained by the allocation of political power in France (a structural context the RN has to deal with) and the asymmetry between the territorial discourse of the party and the effective functional positioning of Lorraine in the Saar-Lor-Lux area. France, a unitary state, has allocated limited power to its regions (Cole 2011; Cole et al. 2021). Therefore, Lorraine, which does not offer much of a pathway to power, is not extremely relevant for the RN as a scale to be circulated in the politicization of COVID-19. In parallel, the promotion of the Saar-Lor-Lux scale would be at odds with a cohesive RN discourse. The French RWP party presents itself as the party of a great and proud French nation within a Europe of nations, while the French region of Lorraine is partly becoming the residential periphery of a small Luxembourg and Saarland (one of the smallest German Länder) within an economically unbalanced Saar-Lor-Lux area. The functional Saar-Lor-Lux organization reflects a Luxembourg and German regional dominance that is best ignored rather than recognized or even criticized, as more than 100,000 French workers and potential RN electors depend on this regional integration, which simultaneously reflects the economic weakening of France in the EU.

Conclusion: observing the spread of a virus in RWP discourse and within a multi-scalar Europe

RWP parties have thrived in Europe over recent decades due to EU crises and the capacity of RWP parties to produce a discourse of crisis amplification (Moffitt 2015). COVID-19 is the most recent European cross-border issue around which a populist discourse of crisis has been performed (Bobba and Hubé 2021). The current article shows that COVID-19 has been absorbed into RWP discourse along the lines of a European ‘meta-populism’/’transnational populism’ (De Cleen 2017; Lamour 2020; Moffitt 2017) within a spatial context rarely mentioned in Europe: European cross-border functional regions. Three main insights result from the analysis carried out in the Saar-Lor-Lux area. First, the European upscaling of in-group vs. out-group antagonism can be structured around different communities across the border, even if RWP parties are located in the same European region. Second these communities are associated with a multi-scalar European space. The Saar-Lor-Lux region – and its state-bounded regional components – is sometimes, but not always, a spatial level linked to in-group and out-group communities. Third, a discourse against the relativization of scale is produced concomitantly with this European meta-populism. RWP parties desire a return to the primacy of the state scale. However, RWP parties can also promote regional scales associated with Saar-Lor-Lux as long as these regions are a legal primary avenue to power complementary to the state one (Saarland for the AfD in Germany) or the crucial hinterland of a ‘local state’ (Saar-Lor-Lux for the ADR in Luxembourg). The reference to European regions within the COVID-19-related RWP discourse is consequently determined by parameters fixed within states (the allocation of strong executive powers to state and/or regional authorities to be accessed by RWP parties) and across states (the political value of the localized functional European integration process for potentially electoral-winning RWP antagonism).

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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].