The Radical Right: masking polarizing discourse? An urgent analysis of the campaign speech for the 2024 European Elections.

The alarming constant growth of radical political right parties peaked in the last European Parliament elections. However, looking closer at their success, we observe heterogeneous discourse strategies, attending to cultural and socioeconomic voters’ backgrounds to customize their discourse. Therefore, RPP’s communication strategy in Italy, Spain, Portugal, or Greece has little to do with the speeches of their counterparts in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, or Austria. Furthermore, the cases of fake news and misinformation production coming from illiberal positions in Poland and Hungary are of great concern at EU institutions. This study raises the research question: To what extent do radical right parties mask their positions on the most relevant issues for the European agenda in polarizing discourses? The second question is to differentiate radical right parties based on the socio-cultural characteristics of the countries in which they operate. This paper assumes that radical right Parties in Southern Europe tend to establish Discourse and themes differently than their counterparts in Central or Northern Europe. We will explore and analyse the discourse of these parties on their social media platforms and manifestos. Through web scraping and machine learning techniques with supervised and unsupervised mechanisms, we classify the topics and the tone attending its differences and their impact.