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ERRANT - Ethnography of Radical Right Across Nations and Territories
Elisa Bellè's Marie Curie project, called ERRANT – Ethnography of Radical Right Across Nations and Territories, proposes an in-depth and comparative study of two leading actors of European populist radical right: the Italian Lega and the French Rassemblement National (RN). The project, organized around two in-depth qualitative case studies, analyses the dynamics of parties’ territorial anchorage at the forefront of their institutionalization, in two middle-sized, peripheral towns where they have already accessed the mainstream (high electoral scores, party in local government, cultural hegemony). It also sheds light on the internal life and fabric of the two parties, giving voice to the activists themselves in their everyday interactions, from rank and file to higher executives. Moreover, ERRANT analyses the local polarization between the parties’ networks and civil progressive counter-movements, with a specific focus on two explosive lines of conflict: ethnicity/immigration and gender/LGBT equality. With an experimental mix of immersion and comparison, ERRANT inaugurates a new methodological template that will be useful for future ethnographic works on the radical right. Beyond the two case studies, the research aims to produce new interpretative categories of partisanship, organization, political cultures of radical right parties.
