Representing the radical right of the Grande Nation in the Grand Duchy: the viral ‘fortress Europe’, the contagious ‘borderless Europe’ and the non-communicable ‘cross-border regional Europe’

Abstract

The European radical right has influenced the mainstream political agenda on extra-European migration with its election-winning ‘fortress Europe’ narratives. In parallel, it has shaped political alliances within a ‘borderless Europe’, with a view to representing a Europe of people opposed to a Europe of elites. The mass media have circulated this European right-wing radicalism, and academic research has been carried out concerning the motives behind this media representation. Nevertheless, this research has rarely taken into consideration whether the media associate the radical right with a key scale of the European construction: cross-border regions. The current article explores this potential phenomenon by analysing how the press in Luxembourg portray the French radical right, as Luxembourg and France share a cross-border region characterised by strong economic interdependencies. The results show that the media can be keen on representing the political destiny of the radical right in the neighbouring state in regional borderlands. However, the portrayed dynamics are not necessarily linked to cross-border regional integration itself. Commercial–and above all political–motives linked to other European scales can lead to the absence of the ‘cross-border regional Europe’ in the media agenda when the foreign, yet nearby, radical right is portrayed.