Chapter 7. Italy

Abstract

The Italian Northern League (Lega Nord), now simply “Lega”, and its leader Matteo Salvini exemplify the tenets and discursive style of right-wing populism, in which polarised discourse is imbued with nationalistic overtones. The study focuses on the comments on Salvini’s posts on Twitter by his supporters in the last six weeks before the European elections of 2019. The aim is to foreground what motivations encouraged the support for populist parties, with a focus on the role played by national identity and by the strategies that were chosen to recontextualise the original posts. To achieve this purpose, the textual and visual components of sample comments are analysed qualitatively and quantitatively under the lens of multimodal discourse analysis in order to determine which populist themes they reproduced and, drawing on appraisal analysis, understand the evaluation most frequently associated with them.