Mobilizing Past and Future: Radical Right Candidates and Citizens in the 2019 European Elections

How do radical right candidates mobilize the past and the future when running for the European Parliament, and how do citizens engage with these narratives? This project investigates temporal rhetoric on Twitter during the 2019 European Parliament elections, drawing on posts from more than 3,000 candidates across six countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the UK, and Ireland) together with over one million public replies. We examine how references to past and future become nodes of interaction in digital campaigning. Drawing on theories of collective memory, political temporality, and the construction of political imaginaries, we explore how candidates evoke nostalgic pasts, narratives of decline, threatened futures or renewal, and how citizens respond, reinterpret, or contest these frames. The European Parliament elections provide an ideal case, as candidates in multiple countries campaign simultaneously for the same institution. We draw on computational text analysis to identify past- and future-oriented constructions across five languages and to analyze how temporal meanings emerge through interaction rather than as fixed campaign messages. The aim is to map how candidates frame time across countries and how these framings relate to ideology and audience responses. Rather than assuming a coherent radical right temporal narrative, we approach temporality as performed and negotiated in real time, a dynamic arena where elite cues, audience participation, and platform logics intersect. The project aims at shedding light on how political actors and publics collaboratively shape interpretations of where we come from and where we are going in digital campaigning, contributing to debates on political imagination and the temporal dimensions of radical right communication.