Chapter 7
Italy
“Long live our Captain!”: A multimodal analysis of the comments on
Matteo Salvini’s tweets by his supporters
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.
Article outline
- Introduction
- Background: The League and Matteo Salvini
- Theoretical framework and methodology
- Methods of analysis
- Operational notes
- Results
- Conclusions
-
Notes