Neofascist “Thugs,” Pandemic Protests, Populisms: Giorgia Meloni’s Cerchiobottismo and the Rise of Fratelli D’Italia During the Pandemic

Pietrucci, Pamela

doi:10.1080/13183222.2023.2168444

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 18 publications

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“…From the beginning of 2021, with the Draghi government, have been emerged contrasting positions in facing the pandemic: Forza Italia reinvented itself as a moderate, pro-EU party, (Albertazzi et al, 2021), the Lega become part of the government, while Fratelli d’Italia the only party excluded. As note by Pietrucci (2023), this split influenced the public perception of the three parties in the year leading up to the national election in 2022. According to Zanotti and Meléndez (2023) the different roles played by the parties in 2021 allowed Fratelli d’Italia to be able to «challenge the government’s actions and to depict itself as the only party acting in the people’s interest, opposing the elite» (Zanotti and Meléndez, 2023: 93).…”

Section: The Italian Right-wing Alliance and The Covid-19 Scenario: A...mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Italians locked at home, illegal migrants free to disembark’: How populist parties re-contextualized the anti-immigration discourse at the time of COVID-19 pandemic

Lucchesi

Romania

2023

Discourse & Society

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By drawing on a Critical Discourse Studies perspective, we analyze language and discursive strategies used by 36 Italian populist right-wing politicians in constructing the narration of immigration during the covid-19 period on their Facebook pages, combining Corpus Linguistics and the analysis of the discursive argumentation. The main aim is to verify a potential discursive construction between immigration and the spread of the virus also considering the change of the government and the role assumed by different parties. Results suggest that the connection between migration and pandemic has not been traduced in a discourse able to systematically blame migrants as vehicles for the virus, rather politicians operated a re-contextualization of past discursive strategies based on the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy. Moreover, lexicon and argumentative analysis identified interesting differences between parties especially with the change of government and the new conformation of the alliance. The article shows elements of continuity concerning the political discourse on immigration, but it also stressed important outputs concerning the politicization process showing that pandemic constitutes a critical ‘politicizing moment’ that operated as a mechanism of further normalization of anti-immigration discourse.

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Section: The Italian Right-wing Alliance and The Covid-19 Scenario: A...mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Italians locked at home, illegal migrants free to disembark’: How populist parties re-contextualized the anti-immigration discourse at the time of COVID-19 pandemic

Lucchesi

Romania

2023

Discourse & Society

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The Middle Region Populism of Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi on Instagram

Trillò

Starita

2023

The International Journal of Press/Politics

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This paper investigates the Instagram self-presentation of Italian party leaders Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi. Building on the notion that circumstances are crucial to the construction of the self through digital photography, we argue that the two leaders strategically use setting and accompaniment to navigate the demands of their populist self-presentation as “ordinary super leaders”: exceptional celebrity-like personae whose lives remain nonetheless close to those of their constituents. To make our case, we analyze a corpus of images featuring the two leaders posted on their Instagram profiles during 2020 (266 for Meloni and 158 for Renzi). Our findings suggest that Meloni and Renzi alternate and remix celebrity practices of exclusivity, exceptionalism, and everydayness in an attempt to come across as simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary, aspirational and relatable. Inspired by Meyrowitz’s “middle region politics,” we propose the notion of middle region populism to describe how populist leaders leverage the affordances of an image-centric social media platform and the vernacular of internet celebrity to curate an online presence in which they pose as exceptionally charismatic yet ordinary and relatable.

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Neofascist “Thugs,” Pandemic Protests, Populisms: Giorgia Meloni’s Cerchiobottismo and the Rise of Fratelli D’Italia During the Pandemic

Cited by 2 publications

References 18 publications

‘Italians locked at home, illegal migrants free to disembark’: How populist parties re-contextualized the anti-immigration discourse at the time of COVID-19 pandemic

‘Italians locked at home, illegal migrants free to disembark’: How populist parties re-contextualized the anti-immigration discourse at the time of COVID-19 pandemic

The Middle Region Populism of Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi on Instagram

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