Skip to main content
Home
Snurblog — Axel Bruns

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Information
  • Blog
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Presentations
  • Press
  • Creative
  • Search Site

The Split Communication Strategies of the French Far Right

Snurb — Monday 14 July 2025 19:01
Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Social Media | Twitter | IAMCR 2025 | Liveblog |

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuefeng Qu, whose interest is in the growth of far-right populism on Xitter. She is exploring this especially in the context of the French far-right party Rassemblement National. RN has now emerged as a major force in French politics, with typically nationalist and exclusionary views.

This might be understood as a kind of populism 2.0, which bypasses conventional media, draws on viral rhetoric, and positions political leaders as personal brands and political influencers. It also capitalises on mainstream media tendencies to favour game frames over issue frames, covering the political horse race rather than the substance of the policies preferred by competing political parties and groups.

There are various studies comparing the various European far-right parties and their leaders; however, few studies examine the strategies of the various political leaders within a single far-right party like RN. In France, RN Leader Marine Le Pen now also shares her stage with Jordan Bardella, and the two leaders’ communicative strategies are not always entirely aligned. This project explored this by analysing their posts on Xitter.

Le Pen was found to emphasise a pragmatic approach focussed on pragmatic issues; she highlighted simplistic binary oppositions between French and European or other foreign interests. Bardella favoured a more emotional and interactive tone, also engaging especially with youth-oriented formats (live video, memes). This splits their efforts across different demographics, especially along generational lines. This might also serve to temper the radical image associated with far-right movements.

  • 1 view
INFORMATION
BLOG
RESEARCH
PUBLICATIONS
PRESENTATIONS
PRESS
CREATIVE

Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

» more

Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

» more

Opinion and Press

Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

» more

Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

» more

Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

Bluesky profile

Mastodon profile

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) profile

Google Scholar profile

Mixcloud profile

[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence]

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.