Against immigration, in favour of democracy: the role of immigration in the Italian populist radical right’s discourse during the Covid-19 pandemic

At the 2 June anniversary celebration of the foundation of the Italian Republic, Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni, leaders, respectively, of the Lega and of Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), staged a street march in Rome sporting Italian-flag-patterned masks. They meant to protest against Giuseppe Conte’s, the Italian Prime Minister, management of the Covid-19 pandemic. In doing so, Lega and FdI portrayed themselves as the saviours of Italy’s people and Italy’s democracy. The relationship between populism and democracy is fraught with tensions. On one hand, the populist framing of democracy in an exclusionary light, casting off certain groups such as immigrants, challenges the deep-seated link between liberal democracy, popular sovereignty, and minority rights (Finchelstein, Urbinati 2018). On the other hand, the populist framing of themselves as saving the will of the people suggests the strategic deployment of discourses around democracy to cover otherwise undemocratic discourse (Halikiopoulou, Vasilopoulou, Mock 2013). While vast attention has been cast on the paradoxes inherent to the relationship between populism and democracy (see, for instance, Moffitt 2020), the recent Covid-19 pandemic shaking Italian politics poses a new conundrum worth examining: to what extent has the role of immigration, which has been traditionally framed in exclusionary terms in Italian right-wing populism, changed in Italian right-wing populist discourse during the Covid-19 pandemic? In which ways has a stance against immigration been linked to a stance pro-democracy? The analysis of this case study can yield important insights regarding the role of immigration in populist parties across Europe at a time when the continent had to face a new Other against which to fight, i.e. the Covid-19 pandemic, and on the connections of immigration with the deployment of democratic discourse. While before the pandemic populist parties covered exclusionary discourse in seemingly democratic values of freedom and human rights, during the pandemic, populist parties changed the framing of immigration to different extents and increased their attack on the governments’ apparently undemocratic handling of the emergency situation. This paper uses interviews with Lega and FdI representatives, and the analysis of the parties’ Faceboook (FB) posts on immigration in the period between March 2021 and May 2021. Qualitative discourse analysis is deployed, paying special attention to framings of immigrants and of democracy. FB is widely used by Lega and FdI and reaches out to a wider share of potential voters than Twitter. Interviews are used to explore more in depth themes emerged through the FB posts. The tentative argument is that the prominence of immigration in the Italian populist radical right’s discourse only initially decreased during the pandemic; its exclusionary traits were preserved but shrouded in democratic discourse, evident in the contrast made between the government’s limitation of freedoms for Italians and the apparent freedom conceded to immigrants.