Double Bind or Political Advantage? The Negotiation of Womanhood in the Online Discourse of Female Right-Wing Populist Politicians

Marine Le Pen and Riikka Purra are the front-figures of right-wing populist parties in France and Finland. Known for their patriarchal and anti-feminist agendas, these movements remain dominated by men. However, the number of women, including political leaders, in far right and populist movements is growing. Thus, there is a call for research that focuses specifically on female right-wing populist political leadership. This chapter aims to contribute to previous literature right-wing populism and political communication with a multimodal critical discursive psychological study of Marine Le Pen’s and Riikka Purra’s online political mobilisation. More specifically, in this chapter we investigate how the two populist far right leaders deploy identity management strategies in their online communication—official Twitter accounts and political blogs—to construct and negotiate their position as female and right-wing populist political leaders, and how they flexibly rework, negotiate and navigate between these positions to rhetorically appeal to diverse audiences. Our results show three distinct yet in many ways intertwined ways in which these politicians positioned themselves as (female) political leaders. The positions were (1) the strong leader for both men and women, (2) the protector of ‘our’ vulnerable women and (3) the protector of men. In line with previous research demonstrating the paramount importance of social media for the political campaigning and mobilization of populist movements, the present study contributes to the critical social and political psychological study of right-wing populism theoretically, by examining the ways in which gender and political leadership is negotiated in female right-wing populist leaders’ discourse; methodologically, through deploying the analytic tools of CDP in a fine-grained analysis of online political mobilization; and empirically, by providing a novel comparative contribution to research on female populism in Europe.