Abstract
This working paper presents the findings of quantitave and qualititave research into populist communication on Facebook. Specifically, we look at how populist politicians from all across Europe used Facebook in their campaigns for the European Parliamentary elections in May 2019 and compared this with a posts from July 2019.
We start the paper with sections on research design and then outline the importance of social media for populist political communication. From here, we present the findings of our comparative research.
We found that the use of Facebook varied widely around the bloc. Some countries - Spain, Italy, the UK, France, and Poland - display a more widespread use of social media and with more complex usage, whilst others, such as Lithuania, have a low usage level.
As a result, we maintain that there is no, one online populist strategy currently in use. Instead, the frequency, tone and topic of social media usage by populist actors differs from country to country, actor to actor, and over time, with specific national contexts playing an important role.
The findings point to a 'weak' Europeanisation, with European elections acting as second order elections, and politicians acting nationally rather than as Europeans. As both a symptom and a cause of this, there is a strong current of Euroscepticism and anti-European sentiment, with a growing network of right-wing, nativist, populist actors, who share policies and discourses.
This is proven in the emergence of the Europe of Nations and Freedom group in the EP.