When COVID-19 circulates in right-wing populist discourse: the contribution of a global crisis to European meta-populism at the cross-border regional scale

Abstract

The success of European Right-Wing Populist (RWP) parties is related to a context of crisis, offering the opportunity to mobilize antagonisms between the people, the elite and a series of ‘others’. Studies have been carried out to find out how populist parties have reacted to COVID-19 in Europe. However, it is still unknown whether these parties have used the pandemic to intensify a European ‘meta-populism’; that is, a European upscaling of the antagonistic discourse involving people-centred in-groups and elite/others-related out-groups. The current article explores how representatives of RWP parties located in three different states (France, Germany and Luxembourg), but in the same European cross-border region (the Saar-Lor-Lux area), mobilized COVID-19 to potentially structure a European meta-populism. Following a broad analysis of the discourse on COVID-19 produced on each side of the border during the initial phases of the pandemic (February to August 2020), the research is based on a Critical Discourse Analysis of characteristic narratives. It is shown that in such a context, the virus became an integral element of a European meta-populist discourse. However, the identity of the European in-groups and out-groups can be different across borders. These different entities can also be associated with different European spatial scales.