Talking about Migration: the Online Discourse of Some Italian Political Party Leaders

Abstract

The aims of the article are to deconstruct the frames of migration crisis embedded on the official web sites, social networks and blogs belonging to the leaders of the main Italian political parties, positioned on different points of the left or right political spectrum, in the period 2015-2016. According to the relevance of the Italian context, we are also going to study the position of a party that can be considered a post-ideological movement that represents itself as outside of a traditional political spectrum: the Five-star Movement. We analysed text, images and videos published on the Internet 2.0 sites in order to show the legacy of colonialism that was characterized by the ambivalence of the double movement of exclusion and assimilation. Balibar speaks in this regard of the effects of “the third world at home” caused by immigration from former colonies or semi-colonies in capitalist centres. We used digital methods for the ethnographic exploration of social media.