“The mask is (not) a gag”: how CasaPound Italia and Forza Nuova politicized Covid-19 pandemic.

With the increase in infections and deaths, in Italy public health and corona virus emergence became the main point in the political agenda and in the public debate, replacing other issues – such as immigration – closer to the far-right political agenda. Moreover, the spread of uncertainty and fear has led the (now outgoing) Conte government to reach high levels of trust. With this shift in the political agenda and public debate, and with the increase in the level of trust in Conte and its government, at the beginning of the pandemic the far-right disappeared from the public debate and the political arena. However, it emerged again and tried to size the covid-19 emergence, by linking the corona virus emergency with other peculiar issues belonging to the area, sometimes making unexpected claims of freedom. In this contribution I focus on two Italian extreme right political organizations (CasaPound Italia and Forza Nuova), and I compare how they sized the Covid-19 pandemic. Namely, I am interested in analysing their claims and frames, most of all how they linked the issues typical of extreme-right with public health and corona virus emergence. In fact, while immigration issue may have lost its relevance in the extreme-right public discourse, some characteristic of the pandemic and the way government managed it, enabled the two organizations to link other themes that characterize them to the health emergency (such as sovereignty and nationalism). Then I also refer to the way in which they mobilized offline, with a special attention to those mobilizations occurred between the end of the first wave and the beginning of the second wave of infections (May 2020- November 2020). In fact, I think that also in the way in which extreme right organized offline mobilization may be recognized one of the main differences among the area, with those who accepted the existence of the pandemic, and those that denied the danger of the virus. The aim of this contribution is to understand how these two important Italian extreme-right political organizations seized the pandemic and politicized the emergency. I propose this comparative analysis because, even if these two organizations belong to the same political family, I expect many differences in the way they politicized the Covid pandemic. These differences demonstrate that extreme right, even on this occasion, failed to meet and build alliances within the same area and that is still fragmented. To carry out the analysis, I mainly refer to organizations’ documents, thus using their blogs and social network as data source; then I will also use press as a source to map the protest promoted by the two organizations, or where they took part.