Governing space, constructing place: An ethnographic study of two towns governed by the Lega and Rassemblement national

While the rise of the populist radical right (PRR) has been mainly analysed through the lens of ‘methodological nationalism’, this article contributes to the emergent ‘localist turn’ of the debate by examining how PRR parties symbolically and ideologically mobilise local identities. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework that combines political sociology and geography, we investigate how PRR-led local governments transform spatial features into highly ideologised places, by rescaling and reinforcing nationalist claims. In a comparative ethnography of two medium-sized towns, governed by the Italian Lega and the French Rassemblement national, we adopt a space- and place-related approach. Two distinct modes of local exclusionism emerged: folkloric in the French case, and technical-bureaucratic in the Italian; this provides an effective approach for examining the parties’ patterns of power consolidation. Moreover, we underscore how these exclusionary dynamics, rooted in localism, are entangled with the role of space and place in re/producing bordering practices. While in the French case, ‘undesirable others’ are isolated mostly through ghettoisation, in the Italian case they are denied access to key sites of citizenship-building; yet, both strategies pursue exclusionary ends. This contribution argues that the spatialisation of discriminatory politics is a crucial, still underexplored, dimension of PRR, and one that also shapes the conditions for civic mobilisation and contention.