Blame attribution of the populist radical right in times of Covid-19. A comparison of populist radical right parties’ discourses in six Western European countries.

Populist radical right parties (PRRP) have become relevant challengers in almost all western European countries within the last decades. PRRP adopted a winning formula that combines populism and nativism. Both populist and nativist parties strongly depend on blame attribution to others – to specific powerful elites and supposed non-native outgroups. Previous research shows how some recent crisis periods, such as the economic recession of 2008 or the refugee crisis of 2015, have contributed to the public salience and visibility of the main issues addressed by PRRP, thus providing them with a favorable discursive opportunity scenario. However, we know little about how PRRP behave when certain events rather restrict discursive opportunities. The Corona pandemic can be considered as such an “event”, at least as is has developed so far, provoking “rally-'round-the-flag” effects and a lack of discursive opportunities for nativist discourses. But also, anti-elitist demands and blame attribution to ruling national elites could be more difficult to “sell” to the voters in an environment where the public places its hopes in the executive branch. However, PRRP are not only passively exposed to crises and external events. Populist actors actively perform and perpetuate a sense of crisis, rather than simply reacting to such events. In this sense PRRP are expected to participate in the ‘spectacularization of failure’ underlying every crisis. This work attempts to examine how PRRP use blame attributions in times of the Covid-19 pandemic conducting an explorative analysis assessing the targets of PRRP’s blame attribution during the pandemic following a comparative approach. We analyse discourses of PRRP on Twitter during the first six months of the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain and Portugal. We conduct classical quantitative content analyses of Tweets on Twitter observing which actors are blamed by PRRP and for what. We hope to contribute to a better understanding of how PRRPs adapt discursively to different crisis scenarios and how they contribute to feeding the perception of failure and skepticism in the public about the public policies adopted by the authorities to manage de pandemic.