“Africa does not Fit in Europe”

Abstract

The politicization of immigration has moved the debate about immigration at the center of the run-up of elections, creating the breeding ground for the electoral breakthrough and success of right-wing populist parties.
 This article aims at disclosing the narrative of immigration and its politicization in VOX’s discourse, comparing it to the Italian Lega party.
 Clause-based semantic text analysis reveals that both parties share the classic characteristics of nativist populism: the representation of a virtuous and hardworking people, threatened by the invasion by some “others”, immigrants, who intrude the sovereign, antispace of natives to exploit and commit crimes. In both cases, the concept of space is manipulated, representing countries as limited spaces, allowing to depict immigrants as a threat to legitimize negative political responses.
 The study also identifies a novelty: the construction of the rescue NGOs as the new antagonist actor.

Populism, Twitter, and COVID-19: Narrative, Fantasies, and Desires

“…Accordingly, on the one hand, future research should compare more discourses of populist politicians to study the (possible) existence of common patterns, such as the ones retrieved, for example, in anti-immigration discourses (Cervi and Tejedor 2021;. On the other hand, it would be helpful to apply this methodology to non-populist actors to deepen our understanding of how the mediatization of politics (Marín Lladó and Tornero 2020;Higgins 2017;Mazzoleni 2008) forces most political actors to embrace a more emotionally driven communication style.…”

Discurso político ante el multiculturalismo de la derecha española: un análisis comparado entre PP y Vox

“…Se advierte, así, un discurso nativista y hostil al modelo migratorio español. De este modo, se despliegan diferentes discursos: un discurso sobre la inmigración como ilegítima competencia por unos recursos escasos entre autóctonos e inmigrantes (Cervi y Tejedor, 2021), identificando a éstos como competidores ilegítimos; un discurso etnicista en el que se asume con matices la inmigración latinoamericana, pero se rechaza la inmigración de origen musulmán, por ser una amenaza para la identidad nacional (Cheddadi y León-Ranero, 2022); y un discurso que sitúa socio-históricamente al Islam y a los musulmanes como los grandes enemigos de España (Olmos, 2023;Ballester, 2021). Así, el discurso de Vox utiliza elementos identitarios en la construcción de la relación nosotros/otros, siendo el "nosotros" el Occidente cristiano ejecutado en la práctica en la democracia liberal y el "otros" el mundo islámico, caracterizado por la barbarie y la incivilización (Betz, 2013).…”

Tweeting through a Public Health Crisis: Communication Strategies of Right-Wing Populist Leaders during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Benjamin Moffitt (2015: 194) rightly claims that these studies treat the crisis as an external trigger of populism rather than one of its internal features. Populist leaders do not merely benefit from a crisis after it breaks out; instead, they perform a crisis to serve their political interests (for some examples, see Cervi 2020; Cervi and Tejedor 2021). As Rogers Brubaker (2021: 7) puts it, ‘populists do not simply respond to pre-existing crises; they seek to cultivate, exacerbate, or even create a sense of crisis, casting the crisis as one that they alone have the power to resolve’.…”