Exclusionary Populism and Islamophobia: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Spain

Laura Cervi

doi:10.3390/rel11100516

Abstract

Exclusionary populism is well known for twisting real grievances of the citizens, by problematizing the gap between “us” and “them”, capitalizing on identity lines, calling out as “others” those who do not share “pure people’s” identity and culture. Especially after 9/11, Muslims have become the ideal-type of “other”, making Islamophobia the primary populist anti-paradigm. This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on Islamophobic populism analyzing the presence of Islamophobia in the electoral discourse of Vox party in Spain and Lega in Italy. In addition, it makes a novel contribution by discussing and testing the existence of different models of Islamophobia, distinguishing between “banal Islamophobia” and “ontological Islamophobia”. Applying clause-based semantic text analysis—including qualitative and quantitative variables—to thirty speeches by the two party leaders, Santiago Abascal and Matteo Salvini, during the last three elections (General, Regional and European), the paper concludes that, despite the similarities, the two politician display two different models of Islamophobia. Whereas Abascal displays a clear “ontological Islamophobia”, depicting Muslims ontologically incompatible with Spanish civilization (defined precisely by its anti-Muslim history), the latter presents a mix of arguments that oscillate between “ontological” and “banal” Islamophobia.

Highlights

Already more than fifty years ago, Seymour Martin Lipset (1960) indicated how social–political discontent of people is likely to lead them to xenophobia, racism and anti-cosmopolitanism
“ontological Islamophobia”, depicting Muslims ontologically incompatible with Spanish civilization, the latter presents a mix of arguments that oscillate between “ontological” and “banal” Islamophobia
Isolating and analyzing semantic triplets, illustrates how the three core social actors, “us” (“the people”), “them” (“the other”, immigrants and Muslims) and the other “them”, the elites, are linguistically constructed, pointing out the interactions amongst them and revealing both the functions and the model of Islamophobia displayed by the two politicians

Summary

Introduction

Already more than fifty years ago, Seymour Martin Lipset (1960) indicated how social–political discontent of people is likely to lead them to xenophobia, racism and anti-cosmopolitanism. Different studies have tried to understand the reasons behind this growth, pointing at the increasingly numerous Muslim presence in the “West”, the even more increasing visibility of Islam in these societies (Allievi 2006), together with political actors’ interest in constructing the “Islamic threat” (Allen 2012), apace with growing fear of Islam, since 9/11(Cesari 2010). Acknowledging that Islamophobia springs from different sources and discourses (Cesari 2011). It intersects with various political rationales (Ekman 2015), from the illiberal extreme to the more liberal mainstream (Allen 2010b; Mondon and Winter 2017), it is undeniable that, especially after 9/11, Islamophobia has become the primary far-right populist anti-paradigm (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017).

Methods

Results

Conclusion