| Abstract [eng] |
Perceptions of Threats in the 2024 European Parliament Election Campaigns in Lithuania and Spain is a Master’s thesis by Vilija Stanislovaitytė This paper focuses on how both mainstream and far-right parties have been using perceptions of threats in their political campaign for the 2024 European Parliament election in Spain and Lithuania. Taking a theoretical approach from framing, securitization and populism theories, the paper builds its methodology for the research. Quantitative content analysis was applied to analyze social media campaigning of 6 parties in a period of one month till the 2024 European Elections. In Lithuania, 3 parties chosen were Homeland Union-Lithuania Christian Democrats (TS-LKD), Freedom party (LP) and far-right National Alliance (NS). In Spain, 3 chosen parties were Spain’s People's party (PP), Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and far-right VOX. Firstly, the context of social media posts was analyzed by applying questions: • Was it framed to have threat rhetoric? • Was the threat interior or exterior? • What type of threat was it (political, economic, cultural, societal or secular); • Who was the culprit (Immigrants, EU, Globalization, LGBTQ, domestic actors, other countries, etc.)? • Was the threat existential? Three hypotheses were formed from the literature, which were: • The far-right should use more exterior threats (such as the EU, globalization) compared to mainstream parties; • Mainstream parties should use more interim threats (such as extremism, authoritarianism) compared to far-right parties; • Far-right parties should frame more existential threats than mainstream parties. The collected data did not fully support the first two hypotheses, but it did fulfill the third. In the case of Spain, all parties did frame threats in more than half of their social media posts. Though traditional parties focused more on political threats both internally and externally, while VOX framed all 5 types of threats with different culprits. Although, in Spain, all parties mostly painted perceptions of threats to each other – VOX and the PP showed the PSOE leader as a threat to Spanish democracy, while the PSOE framed VOX and the European far-right as the biggest threat to democracy. In Lithuania, the far-right National Front used threats more than half of the time and, like VOX, used all kinds of threats and culprits. Just in the National Front's case, the biggest threat was the LGBTQ community and the European Union. Two other parties – TS-LKD and LP – used threats very rarely compared to the Spanish parties. Mainstream parties in Lithuania did mostly frame Russia and autocratic regimes as threats. Both VOX and NS used existential threats from time to time, usually framing immigration as the end of European civilization. In conclusion, the way selected parties used threat was expected, although the results of this paper show that using politics of fear is not only common for the populist far-right. Although the Lithuanian case shows that the use and type of threats vary a lot from the country's political context and main idea of a pro-European and pro-Atlantic way of seeing the EU. |
