Do populists talk the same? a multilevel analysis of the northern league and five star movements’ positions on immigration and the european union

Abstract

Immigration and the European Union (EU) have become two highly contested issues in Western European politics. This work compares the positions of two ‘different’ populist-Eurosceptic parties on these two matters: the Northern League (LN) and the Five Star Movement (M5S). The chapter proposes a multifaceted conceptualization of the EU and the migration issues to investigate how LN and M5S position across their multiple sub-dimensions. The empirical analysis is based on an original data set of parliamentary speeches delivered by the two parties’ representatives in two distinct institutional arenas: the Italian and the European Parliament. The results show that LN’s positions are guided by cultural-identitarian and sovereignist arguments, while M5S mobilizes the two issues to boost its anti-elitist claims.