Media Governance and Industries Lab Blog

*This blog post is part of the Jean Monnet Chair of European Media Governance and Integration Series curated by Wagner Piassaroli Mantovaneli & Markos Mpadanes

By Prof. Birgit Sauer

Right-wing populist parties and movements use the so-called “crisis of liberal representative democracies” and the shifts in party landscape and participation to mobilize constituency especially of younger people and men. Processes of mediatisation of society have led many political actors to use language, news values and work routines that adapt to both journalistic standards of presenting ideologies, arguments and information as well as public relations techniques. Besides the classical tools of political communication such as posters, party press, presence in mainstream media right-wing populist parties consider the importance of new communication technologies as important tools to address and reach voters. These technologies include general and personal websites, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, blogs and vlogs.

Right-wing organisations and politicians in most European countries have an important online presence, often even more comprehensive and more elaborate than well-established mainstream parties. This extensive use of new communication technologies has several reasons:

First, the Internet and social networks in particular are inexpensive and easily accessible tools to gain visibility, to mobilize constituency and to promote election campaigns.

Second: Right-wing parties and organizations often claim to be mis- or under-represented by mainstream media and therefore prefer Internet media because they ensure unfiltered control of the content of the medium and, hence, a non-restricted diffusion of information. Third, Internet media are able to provide a direct link to voters – especially with people, without the filters of traditional media.

Fourth, the ubiquity of the web multiplies the potential audience of right-wing organisations and parties. From the perspective of consumers, new social media and the Internet pave an easy way to declare oneself a member of a right-wing group or movement. It only needs no more than a few clicks or ‘likes’ to join a community.

Fifth, this wide audience in the web provides a perfect environment for organising consent on right-wing themes and issues in a given political space.

Sixth, electronically mediated and often anonymous communication eschews political and social control more than face-to-face propaganda and therefore leaves room for racist, sexist or homophobic political messages.

Seventh, the Internet easily transgresses national borders of communication and allows right-wing organisations to acquire a strong international presence as well as international links with similar organizations to build cooperative ties and to internationally exchange ideas and narratives but also media content, pictures and videos.

Only recently, research focusses on the genderedness of the right-wing “thin-centred ideology” (Mudde), that is on the fact that right-wing populist parties are “Männerparteien” (Mudde), construction traditional gender roles, traditional gender and family relations and on norms defining “proper” sexual conduct. Also, some of this literature focuses on the ambivalences and contradictions of right-wing gendered mobilisation – especially at the intersection with religion and nationality, i.e. when gender relations within Muslim migrant communities are presented as traditional and patriarchal in order to construct these migrants as “Others” (Sara Farris: “femonationalism”).

While once the internet was praised as a space able to deconstruct gender images, hierarchical binary gender relations and heteronormativity, our analysis of right-wingers’ online performance in six European countries (Austria, France, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, UK) showed the opposite. Our analysis showed a high degree of commonality among the different right-wing populist organisations in terms of their ideas on ‘appropriate’ gender relations (women as mothers and men as breadwinners), ‘natural’ sexuality and the heterosexual family on the one hand and on ‘external Others’ (migrant, Muslim and Roma) on the other hand. Gender thus proved to be an important category of the construction of the antagonism between ‘the people’ and (Muslim) immigrants as ethnicised ‘external Others’ including gendered security and social policy discourses as well as definitions of ‘our’ and/or ’European values’. The ‘threat’ of being outnumbered by ‘Others’ fuels populist constructions of a demographic crisis and reveals the centrality of the family in their discourses. In order to protect ‘the people’ the family, which is defined as a native heterosexual unit, has to be protected.

Differences became apparent between more or less ‘modernised’ parties, most of all with regard to women’s role in the labour market and positions towards single-mothers. While ‘gender equality’ is often rhetorically affirmed, ‘feminism’ was constructed as an elitist ideology and therefore the ‘other’ of ‘real’ women and femininity. In contrast to ‘native’ women LGBT-people were in most cases not included in the right-wing populist ‘we’ and therefore marked as ‘internal others’ of ‘the people’.

Constructions of ‘the people’, which are a core element of right-wing populism’s ‘thin ideology’, use the discourses on gender and sexuality to construct a homogeneous people – which is at the same time constructed as endangered. This preoccupation with issues of biological reproduction on the one hand and ethnically defined purity on the other shows the limits of the modernisation of right-wing populism. Gender is thus instrumentalised to enforce apartheid visions of society in terms of social, economic and cultural rights. And gender is used to mobilize for an ant-democratic project.