Italy has passed a no-confidence verdict in the centre-left

The rise of Beppe Grillo and the political resilience of Silvio Berlusconi were two of the main stories to emerge from last week’s Italian election. As Duncan McDonnell and Giuliano Bobba argue, however, the Grillo and Berlusconi headlines should not disguise the stark position of the Italian centre-left. The Partito Democratico has now lost over three million voters in five years

The likeability of populism on social media in the 2018 Italian general election

This article focuses on the controlled communication that the main Italian political leaders – Silvio Berlusconi, Luigi Di Maio, Pietro Grasso, Giorgia Meloni, Matteo Renzi, Matteo Salvini – published on their Facebook profiles during a period of four weeks before the election day. Taking the 2018 Italian general election campaign as an illustration, this article aims at clarifying whether and to what extent populist communication on Facebook differ from non-populist communication in terms of volume and success. Facebook was selected as the source, since digital politics and social media are becoming increasingly relevant for both political parties and citizens. The article shows that messages containing populist claims have more success (i.e. more ‘likes’) compared to non-populist messages. It also shows that populist posts against the elites or the immigrants are the largest ones, while the more successful ones are those that combines these latter elements with the appeal to the people

Populism and Covid-19 in Europe: what we learned from the first wave of the pandemic

Populist parties are often assumed to benefit electorally from major crises. Yet as Giuliano Bobba and Nicolas Hubé explain, populist actors have found it difficult to politicise the crisis brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on a new book covering the first wave of the pandemic in Europe, they identify several lessons concerning the ... Continue

Inside the secret garden of political parties. Transformations and reactions to primary elections in Italy and France

Primary elections are becoming quite spread within no-US political context. Many political parties in different countries choose to adopt such inclusive methods to select their candidates for general elections. Thus, primary elections have been re-adapted to different political systems, in order to fit with different party’s specific features. This implied a re-definition of the very concept of primary both in terms of procedures and in terms of political meaning. This paper aims to understand the promotion of party primaries in two EU countries: Italy and France. The two countries have implemented open primaries adopting the maximum level of inclusiveness. This paper will focus on the public debate about these two case studies in order to clarify which were the meaning and the political value of the primary contests in 2011 (France) and 2012 (Italy)

European versus Domestic Politics: Media Negativity during the 2019 European Elections Campaign in Italy

This article aims at understanding to what extent European issues and actors are covered through a negative tone within the news coverage of the 2019 EP election campaign in Italy. We rely on an original dataset based on content analysis of the 50 days prior to the 2019 EP elections in four mainstream newspapers (n=3,943) and four mainstream TV newscasts (n=1,873). Our findings show that the media negativity is primarily associated with domestic politics, while all in all European politics is covered using a less negative tone. This general picture is the results of two differentiated patterns: newspapers are less negative towards both EU politics and Eu and foreign political actors, while TV news are more negative towards Eu and foreign political actors

Between mitigation and dramatization: The effect of the COVID-19 crisis on populists’ discourses and strategies

It is widely believed that populists benefit from crisis situations. This chapter discusses the literature on crises and populism from a theoretical perspective and provides a novel framework of analysis for addressing the study of the COVID-19 crisis in the light of its (de)politicization. This framework allows the study of the politicization of the COVID-19 issue by populists looking at the divide between the political and the non-political status of the issue, disputes about different stakes and their relative priority in managing the crisis, and issue-specific and policy-related contentions about COVID-19. The general research question is whether populists in Europe used the COVID-19 issue to gain centrality in the political field and/or to push forward new opposition lines. A further related question is to pinpoint whether populists reacted in a similar way across countries or whether they adapted their response according to their institutional role