“Kick them off!”: Debating the immigration issue in the 2018 Italian National Election Campaign

In the 2018 Italian electoral campaign, the issue of immigration became even more ‘explosive’ after the barbaric, racist, gun attack against several immigrants in the city of Macerata. Though obviously all parties and leaders condemned the attack, some leaders downgraded it to the action of a mad person, who was actually a candidate of the Northern League in 2017. It could be said, however, that such attack manifests the exacerbation of the debate on the immigration issue that occurred in the last few years, and was further intensified in the final months of the 2018 electoral campaign. It is probably no coincidence that the day after the elections, a Senegalese man was killed in Florence by another ‘mad’ Italian man. In this chapter we sought to reconstruct the debate on the immigration issue in the last Italian national electoral campaign by looking at three channels of communication through which political and social actors try to make their political claims and reach a wide audience: the traditional media (the press), the new media (Twitter) and the protest arena. The elements of the structure of the communication in these three channels are basically the same – the claimer, the claim and its content and a target such as the public opinion – can then be compared through their operational media logic. Moreover, their impact on public opinion may differ. By relying on an extensive and differentiated literature review, we formulated 10 hypotheses that we sought to test by resorting to social media big data, press claims and protest events analysis.