Battling to dominate the discursive terrain: how Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron have framed terrorist incidents on Twitter

Abstract

This article seeks to examine how the issue of terrorism has been framed by Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. Marine Le Pen has been eager to exploit these incidents since they fit neatly within her xenophobic and nationalist discourse. On the other hand, Emmanuel Macron seeks to transcend traditional political boundaries and foster unity. These different strategies in framing terrorism will be the focus of this article. In addition, the article will examine whether there are elements of populist contagion in Macron’s framing. The analysis is centred around two terrorist events that occurred in 2020: (1) Samuel Paty’s murder and (2) the Nice knife attack. The data were collected from the Twitter accounts of Le Pen and Macron and analysed via the latent Dirichlet allocation generative statistical model. The result is an in-depth analysis that showcases the different framing strategies of the two case studies regarding terrorism.