Harsh punisher or loving mother? A critical discursive psychological analysis of Marine Le Pen’s presidential Twitter campaign

Abstract

Marine Le Pen managed to mobilise a substantial share of the votes in the French 2022 presidential elections, ending up second after the winner Emmanuel Macron. This study aims to increase our understanding of the political appeal and mobilisation of women in far-right movements by exploring the identity management strategies Marine Le Pen deployed in her presidential Twitter campaign to construct her position as a female, right-wing populist political leader and rightful president of the nation. A corpus of 701 tweets (published between 4 July 2021 and 10 April 2022) from Le Pen’s official Twitter account were analysed through a critical discursive psychological approach. Through our analyses, we identified five subject positions that Le Pen constructed for herself in her discourse: the Protector, the Punisher, the Women’s Candidate, the Mother, and the Voice of Justice. Our findings show that through careful discursive negotiation between femininity and masculinity, Le Pen managed to engage in a dynamic positioning between a harsh candidate who punishes ‘the Other’ and a compassionate and loving mother candidate who takes care of the nation’s children. This flexible way in which Marine Le Pen claimed different positions for herself may have been a central factor that enabled her to appeal to millions of voters in the 2022 French presidential elections. The study contributes to the literature on identity politics and the discursive mobilisation of gender by female far right political leaders.