Vol. 17 No. 1 (2026): Regular Issue (In Progress)
Research Article

Right-Wing Rearticulations of Europe: Contested Geographical Imaginaries in German and French Parliamentary Social Media

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Hannah Lena Boettcher
Institute of Geography (Cultural Geography), Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Georg Glasze
Chair of Geography (Cultural Geography), Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Bio
Cartogram distorted according to the toponym’s frequency in the AfD corpus. Note. Author’s own illustration
DOI: https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.h.boe.17.1.139.159
Categories

Published 2026-04-03

Keywords

  • geographical imaginaries,
  • Europe,
  • right-wing populism,
  • parliamentary discourse,
  • social media,
  • computer-aided discourse analysis
    • ...More
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How to Cite

Boettcher, Hannah Lena, and Georg Glasze. 2026. “Right-Wing Rearticulations of Europe: Contested Geographical Imaginaries in German and French Parliamentary Social Media”. European Journal of Geography 17 (1):139-59. https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.h.boe.17.1.139.159.

Copyright (c) 2026 Hannah Lena Boettcher, Georg Glasze

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Received 2025-09-09
Accepted 2026-03-29
Published 2026-04-03

Abstract

Since the late 2010s, Europe as a political and spatial project has become increasingly contested in political discourse. This contestation has unfolded amid overlapping crises such as Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2019 European elections. Right-wing populist actors have played a central role in reshaping political narratives about Europe. This study examines how hegemonic geographical imaginaries of Europe are challenged in parliamentary discourse between 2019 and 2022, a period marked by a qualitative shift in Euroscepticism towards its normalisation. Focusing on Germany and France, two central yet distinct reference points of European integration, we analyse tweets by members of the German Bundestag and the French Assemblée Nationale, with particular attention to the right-wing parties Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and Rassemblement National (RN). Drawing on lexicometric corpus analysis of Twitter communication, we examine how competing geographical imaginaries of Europe are articulated, stabilised, and contested. The analysis shows that mainstream parliamentary discourse continues to frame Europe primarily as an institutional and normative space. By contrast, AfD and RN mobilise counter-hegemonic imaginaries centred on borders, migration, and sovereignty, selectively appropriating core European vocabularies. Although German and French parliamentary discourse differ in their broader spatial orientations—towards Eastern Europe and global power relations in Germany, and towards national and post-colonial contexts in France—right-wing actors in both cases converge on a markedly nationalised and exclusionary spatial re-articulation of Europe. These findings highlight how social media facilitate the diffusion and normalisation of exclusionary geographical imaginaries and contribute to their cross-national alignment.

Highlights:

  • Right-wing populist actors normalise exclusionary geographical imaginaries of Europe.
  • AfD and RN appropriate European vocabularies to legitimise nationalist spatial narratives.
  • Despite national differences, right-wing parties converge on a nationalised spatial narrative of Europe.
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