It’s Not the Elites! The Far Right and the Frames of European Integration on Twitter in Western Europe

Euroscepticism plays a major role in the discourse and appeal of the far right. To complement existing research on the framing of European integration of the far right based on survey data, offline and online news data, the paper focuses on frames on Twitter. We examine whether populist frames are a significant part of current far right Eurosceptic discourse within and across France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. These are contexts maximizing variation in terms of levels of attachment to EU-membership, number of Twitter users and electoral support for the far right. Building on existing literature on the far right, framing of European integration and the internet, we identify three major discursive frames: Identitarian frames that make nativist, racialised claims about European ‘identity’, economic frames voicing economic utilitarian arguments, and populist ones that argue against ‘the elites’. We contend that interpreting far right framing of the EU mostly as economic or populist does not fully account for nativist-anti-elitist and nativist-utilitarian tendencies within far right critiques to European integration. We make this argument based on an exploratory pilot study on social media content shared by Twitter accounts of far right parties, movements and leaders. Using language processing techniques, we combine statistical analysis of language use as well as critical discourse analysis to explore the ways in which the EU is framed within and across countries. Combining mixed method analysis to study Eurosceptic discourses, this pilot suggests that the moniker ‘populism’ does not adequately name the form of contemporary Euroscepticism as it is expressed by the far right, at least on Twitter.