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Normalizing and Mainstreaming the French Radical Right: Divergences in Leadership Communication during a Summer of Inland and Borderland Tensions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2024

Christian Lamour Open the ORCID record for Christian Lamour [Opens in a new window]
Christian Lamour*
Affiliation:
Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), Luxembourg
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The radical right has become a central political force in most Western democracies. This process has been the result of the normalization and mainstreaming of its political leaders, discourses, and visions of society, notably involving the scapegoating of immigration and the use of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. However, the normalization and mainstreaming of radical right actors competing for the leadership of their overall political family remain an under-researched topic. The scope of the current article is to explore this phenomenon by considering the case of France, which after the United States, is the largest Western state that could potentially be ruled by a radical right president with extensive executive powers. The analysis shows that actors competing for the leadership of the radical right in a given country can generate diverging strategies of normalization and mainstreaming to secure their political distinction. Immigration and the Great Replacement constitute, respectively, a topic and a conspiracy theory that are emphasized and/or downplayed by opportunistic stakeholders weaving a web of interactions to define their comparative legitimacy and supremacy in the public sphere.

Keywords

Radical-right normalization and mainstreamingimmigrationGreat Replacement conspiracy theoryFrancecritical discourse analysis
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , November 2024 , pp. 736 - 759
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association

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