Abstract: With the now-established visibility and electoral success of the contemporary populist radical right (PRR) in Western Europe, existing literature has examined these parties’ refutation of antisemitism in parallel to their continued allusion to antisemitic tropes, to greater and lesser extents. This PhD thesis brings these two strands of literature together in a three-country, three-party, and two-platform analysis of the Facebook and X posts of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), the National Rally (RN) in France, and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) between 2017 and early 2023. First, this thesis applies elements of discourse-historical analysis and of populist “style” to social media data in a novel way to contribute a framework of when Jewish inclusion and exclusion are acceptable to the parties. It demonstrates that the parties construct their ingroups as “victims”, and that Jews are included when this is strategically conducive or when Jewish victimhood does not threaten that of the non-Jewish majority. Second, while existing literature on the PRR’s framing of Jews, Israel, and antisemitism has predominantly focused on party output, this thesis uses mixed methods, Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and inductive qualitative analysis, to analyse the comments by users who engage with the parties’ posts. It contributes a novel framework of user victimhood, showing that users are not able to form a common identity with Jews when they see Jews as an Other (rejective), see Jewish victimhood as competing with their own (competitive), and perceive Jewish victimhood as an accusation of antisemitism (defensive). Despite this, a third contribution of this research is an examination of user responses to antisemitic code words, such as “globalists”, and a conclusion that only rarely are these overtly understood and escalated by users. The thesis thus provides both empirical and methodological contributions to scholarship on the PRR: combining influences from psychology, political science, and history, and applying mixed methods in an original way to deepen and widen understanding of both the parties and users, and examining how the strategy of (anti-)antisemitism fits into broader processes of PRR mainstreaming.
