Eurosceptic or Eurosolidary? Comparing Party and Citizens’ Discourses on the Refugee Crisis on Twitter

Europe is facing the greatest influx of migrants since the Second World War. Given the on-going economic and political difficulties the Union is undergoing, its slow, uncoordinated reaction and limited capacity to find solutions to the deepening crisis was to be expected. For the far-right, Eurosceptic parties that gained momentum during last year’s EP elections, this is just further evidence and opportunity to reinforce anti-immigration discourses. The migration is extensively covered in the traditional media, but particularly in the online and social media. Social media offer affordances for the diffusion of information at a large scale, creating both accurate and disproportional representations of reality, primarily by appealing to sentiment. In this context, this paper investigates the ‘lived’ Euroscepticism as expressed by citizens on social media, interrogating whether the current refugee crisis generates new forms of anti-European attitudes. How does the Euroscepticism of the people look like? Does it mirror the one expressed by anti-EU political parties in their anti-immigrant discourses? Is there a form of Eurosceptic spectatorship emerging on social media? These are the questions I discuss, drawing primarily on a comparative analysis of Twitter feeds and interactions on the refugee topic in late summer and early autumn 2015. In addition to relevant hashtags, a selected number of national Twitter accounts of Eurosceptic politicians are analysed using a discourse analytical approach. Observations point to divergent citizen and politicians discourses, the former being centred around solidarity.