Migrations, Populisms and Emergencies: A Sicilian Case Study

ABSTRACT

The contemporary political situation has been characterized, in recent years, by the emergence of multiple forms of populism. Since populist discourses have often used migrants and migrations instrumentally, one should clarify what populism, souverainism and the ‘spatialization of fear' actually mean. In this sense, many European states have ambiguously wavered between the rejection of supranational entities (as in the case of the United Kingdom with the Brexit, or the first version of Marine Le Pen's Front National) and the desire to strengthen European borders, considered culturally homogeneous, against the ‘threat' of foreigners arriving from Africa and Asia. Ever since the coronavirus emergency exploded, populism has been similarly ambiguous with regard to cities, which are sometimes considered the receptacle for all evil (and all diseases), while at other times they are a political model (with obvious reference to the Greek polis) to be defended, once again, in the clash of civilizations that characterizes our era. If, in fact, there are many studies on the construction of the populist discourse at the national or supranational scale, less attention has been paid to the urban scale, which also plays a key role in the articulation between identity rhetoric, practices of confinement and spatial imagery. In this turbulent context, Palermo has also experienced some episodes, albeit not very well known, of populist anti-migrant rhetoric. Since the prevailing narrative for now, due to Covid-19, focuses on security obsessions, migrants have been linked to a stigma that configures them as carriers of dangerous diseases, not only at the national scale but also and especially at the urban level. By building on the existing scientific literature on populism, and through the use of a qualitative methodology based on critical discourse analysis, this contribution aims to outline the links between migration, populism and health emergencies, starting from a theoretical framework and then describing the specific case of Palermo, still subject to rapid changes. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.