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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

After many years of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002), the study of the populist radical right party family (henceforth PRR) (Mudde, 2007) has recently undergone a ‘localist turn’ (Chou et al., 2022). Several factors are driving this expanding debate. First, the territorial rootedness and diversification of party organisations have proven essential to their electoral growth (Albertazzi et al., 2025). Second, PRR parties’ increasing access to subnational governments has created important ‘testing arenas’ for political alliances and agendas (Paxton, 2023). Third, major electoral events – such as Trump’s elections or the Brexit referendum – have revealed the importance of geographical and place-related factors (Lizotte, 2019). This has prompted broader reflection on the PRR’s relationship with the so-called ‘places that don’t matter’ (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018), while taking into account the interplay between the economic transformations of late capitalism (deindustrialisation, financialisation, and tertiarisation), new territorial divides, and growing support for PRR parties (Agnew and Shin, 2017; Lizotte, 2019).

In this contribution we explore another possible development of this ‘localist turn’, by focusing on the PRR’s symbolic and ideological use of local identities and attachments (Bellè, 2025; Cramer, 2016; Fitzgerald, 2018; Hochschild, 2018). We base our analysis on a comparative ethnographic study of the Italian Lega Salvini Premier (formerly the Lega Nord) and the French Rassemblement national (former Front national), the two oldest and most voted-for PRR parties in Western Europe. The parties are analysed at the local level: our ethnographic case studies are two middle-sized towns where they recently gained municipal power, in two regions of historical rootedness.

In the first theoretical section, through an interdisciplinary approach combining political sociology and geography, we show how emphasis on the local – conceived as an exclusionary and nativist form of belonging – is compatible with the nationalism typical of PRR parties. The construction of ‘small homelands’ strengthens nationalism in a dynamic interplay of back-and-forth processes, along with the rescaling of ideological pillars such as populism and nativism.

The second section outlines our theoretical and methodological proposal, arguing that the analysis of PRR’s local governance benefits from a space- and place-related approach. Combining concepts from sociology and political science with those from political geography and social movement studies, we show how PRR parties’ local government work materialises through assembling and transforming spatial features into a highly ideologised place.

Having outlined our methodological approach and research design, we then present our main empirical results. We show how localism is ideologically mobilised to convey nativism and exclusionism, by examining the policies and discursive strategies through which spatial elements are reconfigured. These, in turn, shape the ‘place character’ (Molotch et al., 2000) of the two cities according to exclusionary and authoritarian ideological principles. Then, we highlight local progressive civil societies’ mobilisation against certain illiberal governing actions by the two parties. In the final discussion, we compare the cases, and call for new interdisciplinary research approaches that integrate space and place as key epistemological tools for understanding the PRR’s normalisation.

Rescaling borders: The PRR’s drift between big and small homelands

PRR parties’ discursive emphasis on the local dimension as a source of ideologically charged political belonging might appear to contradict a core tenet of this political family: nationalism. On the contrary, focusing on local attachments might reinforce nationalism (Bellè, 2025; Confino and Skaria, 2002), by eliciting three core ideological elements that, according to Cas Mudde (2007: 19), define the PRR: populism, which divides society into a virtuous ‘pure people’ and corrupt elites; nativism, which advocates for a homogeneous national community excluding foreigners; and authoritarianism, which emphasises strong leadership, traditionalism, and law and order policies.

More specifically, we focus here on the interplay between populism and nativism. Our thesis is that the ideologisation of the local dimension enables the rescaling of the nationalist and populist ‘we’ into local horizons of proximity, through mobilising distinct and autonomous meaning-making repertoires (Confino and Skaria, 2002) and ‘place-related attitudes’ (Arzheimer and Bernemann, 2023). This process operates through a folklorisation of history and culture, in which selected elements are extracted and reassembled into monolithic, ahistorical constructions oriented towards socio-cultural homogeneity (Almeida, 2019; Bellè, 2025). This cultural assemblage and celebration of ‘roots’ and ‘traditions’ in a reactionary sense reinforces in turn the populist opposition between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’.

The ‘good old world’ of the province is ideologically constructed as a space of supposed moral purity, counterposed to morally corrupted urban and globalised elites (Cramer, 2016; Lizotte, 2019), and thereby serves an anti-cosmopolitan and anti-intellectual agenda. Ultimately, the PRR’s local homeland articulates in populist terms the classic sociological tension between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, as theorised by Tönnies and Weber (Guasti and Bustikova, 2023). The ideologisation of the local in a reactionary sense becomes in this context a rhetorical rejection of modernity and a celebration of exclusionary communitarianism and mechanical solidarity, in opposition to the complexity and transience of contemporary social ties (Bellè, 2025).

This imagined local community reinforces the foundational element of nativism – defined here, following Mudde (2007: 19), as the belief that states should be inhabited exclusively by natives, and that non-native individuals threaten the homogeneous nation-state. Indeed, the nativist paradigm can be effectively rescaled to the local level, by embedding bordering practices within everyday relationships and spatial proximity (Beurskens, 2023; Casaglia et al., 2020).

The empirical cases examined here are particularly suitable for analysing this interplay between ‘small and big homelands’. The Lega Salvini Premier, formerly Lega Nord (Northern League), has a long history of institutionalisation, both nationally and – more enduringly – at the subnational level. For over three decades, the party has held power across large areas of northern and, more recently, central-northern Italy, while cultivating an image as a party of effective local governance (Passarelli and Tuorto, 2018).

Notably, the Lega (League) represents a rare case of an ethno-federalist party reframing its offer in nationalist terms (Barcella, 2022), by relying more on sovereigntism than on nationalism per se (Bellè and Gargiulo, 2025). Sovereignism is understood as the capacity to exercise authority and control, shifting the focus from the state to the local dimension of power (Agnew, 2005); it is effective for the party’s rescaling of ideological and identity borders, as it nuances the relationships among state, control, and place (Casaglia et al., 2020). The Lega’s cultural and electoral universe of small-town Italy (Agnew and Shin, 2017) has thus been extended nationally by insisting on the right to sovereignty as a connecting thread between local and national.

The personalisation of the party around its current leader, Matteo Salvini (Zulianello, 2021), has strategically assisted the regional/national switch through a new, nation-scale celebration of ‘the local’ – as exemplified by his constant, hyper-mediatised presence at local fairs and festivals. These events serve also as platforms for gastropopulism, a major symbolic-identitarian resource (Demuru, 2021) rooted precisely in place-branding (Starita, 2022). However, this process of nationalisation conceals ambivalent – possibly cosmetic – elements. Indeed, the party’s current statute still declares federal transformation of Italy as an objective, although it is no longer pursued explicitly (Zulianello, 2021).

The French Rassemblement national (National Rally), formerly Front national (National Front), offers another interesting case regarding the interplay of ‘big and small homelands’. Despite being one of the oldest and most electorally successful PRR parties in Europe, it has been excluded from national government due to a longstanding politics of cordon sanitaire. However, after protracted efforts at de-demonisation (dédiabolisation) – the term coined and largely used in the French debate for the mainstreaming strategy pursued particularly by Marine Le Pen in succeeding her father (Mayer, 2013) – the party gained significant ground in the 2014 municipal elections (Paxton and Peace, 2021). This wave of local victories offered an unprecedented access to power, prompting investment in local governance, and adding localist nuances to RN’s historically marked nationalism (Ivaldi and Dutozia, 2018).

In emphasising its new subnational power, the party has ideologised urban/rural divides in a communitarian and anti-cosmopolitan key (Bellè and Faury, 2025), by counterposing a rural and provincial France – supposedly white and traditionalist – with urban suburbs, portrayed as predominantly Black, Arab, and Muslim, within a framework of competing ‘geographies of exclusion’ (Sibley, 1995).

Although research on this new local governing role remains limited, two elements stand out in the scholar debate. The first is the role of local power in supporting the de-demonisation strategy, by emphasising proximity, pragmatism, and non-partisan attitudes in administration (Paxton and Peace, 2021; Peace and Paxton, 2023). Second, studies highlight how this narrative emphasising neutrality and concreteness actually disguises highly ideologised, locally based policies (Almeida, 2019; Bellè and Faury, 2025).

From space to place: Building a local PRR agenda

While the Lega and RN present different trajectories in terms of local/national rescaling (from localism to nationalism and vice versa), we argue that, in both cases, there is a considerable analytical advantage in deploying a space- and place-related approach when examining their local governance (and, more broadly, PRR parties in local power). By this, we mean an approach that systematically connects the policies implemented, the discourses supporting them, and their sociopolitical impact on the local social fabric, to space and place. These two concepts, following Farinelli (2003: 11), are here understood respectively as the physical or imagined expanse in which events and objects are located and through which they are related or connected (‘the everywhere’); and that specific, meaningful ‘somewhere’ shaped by human experiences, emotions, memory, histories, and attachments. Our proposed space- and place-related approach focuses precisely on the transition between these two dimensions. Through this interstitial meaning-making process, ideologisation turns spatial elements into ideologically connotated places.

The central element in this ‘spatialisation of power’ – and therefore, this ‘ideologisation of place’ – is the re/production of borders. The PRR’s bordering practices are, as is well known, the basis for reproducing the we/them counterposition and otherisations that characterise PRR parties (Casaglia et al., 2020). These borders are not just symbolic artefacts; they are also essential for a spatial and geographical project, whose effects oscillate between belonging and exclusion (Casaglia et al., 2020). Moreover, a space- and place-related analytical perspective sheds light on how the PRR’s third key ideological pillar – the law-and-order approach (Mudde, 2007) – affects the management of urban contexts, which are entrenched within ongoing dynamics of gentrification and the expulsion of vulnerable groups and/or ‘undesirable others’ from public space (Griffin and Young, 2023). This process, which associates bordering with ‘ordering and othering’ (Almeida, 2022), is implemented by following intersectional lines of exclusion, and often mobilises the moral trope of decorum (Pitch, 2013); this is understood as a reactionary and authoritarian vision of society and social relations, whose aims include spatially confining ‘the others’.

Another fundamental aspect in the ideological transition from space to place is PRR parties’ use of toponymy and odonymy (place and street naming) (Zavatti, 2021). The literature extensively documents how shifts in political systems have historically brought about changes in place names, beginning with pivotal moments such as the French Revolution (Mamvura, 2023), or according to national identities and related conflicts (Demetriou, 2006). According to Halbwachs (1950), collective memory materialises in physical spaces: memory and space mutually influence each other. More specifically, in the Italian context, political contention over toponymy is particularly visible and polarising (Bernardi, 2019). One significant source of conflict concerns the interpretation of fascism’s historical legacy within a national environment that underwent a challenging democratic transition after World War II (De Nicolò and Fimiani, 2019), where neo-fascist political forces have attempted to advance their narratives by strategically mobilising toponymy (e.g., through renaming streets) (Bernardi, 2019). A further relevant dimension in the PRR’s local agenda is the reduction of public spaces for social encounters and interaction (Bolet, 2021). While Bolet’s fundamental contribution focuses on this element as a contextual factor supporting electoral success, this process remains relatively underexplored as an intentional political strategy of the PRR.

Finally, a space- and place-related approach can also be extremely useful for investigating a neglected topic: namely, civil society’s key role in contesting and countering the rise of the PRR (Meier et al., 2025). Martin and Miller (2003) indeed argue that space and place are ‘both context for and constitutive of dynamic processes of contention’ (149). A spatially sensitive perspective can thus illuminate why and how some places witness anti-PRR mobilisation that sometimes succeeds, while elsewhere there is minimal or no opposition. What accounts for these differences? The concept of ‘place character’ (Molotch et al., 2000) provides a useful tool for analysing the nexus between PRR institutionalisation and civil society’s responses. Place character is constituted by the ongoing entrenchment of symbolic and physical dimensions: people’s perceptions, uses, and narratives about places shape their sociocultural and material construction (Gieryn, 2000). Molotch et al. (2000: 816) interpret place character as ‘the mode of connection among unlike elements’, and tradition as ‘the mode of perpetuating these links’. The political salience of a place’s character lies in how its features relate to and inform cultural narratives ‘that provide a script about how one should live and who one should be in a place’ (Brown-Saracino, 2015: 5).

Research design, method and context

Among the PRR’s vast political family, the Lega Salvini Premier and the Rassemblement national (RN) are two major actors, each with a long political history and a solid electoral base. Considering our interest in the PRR’s local implantation, we focus on regions where it has a strong electoral base and historical cultural rooting. For the Lega, we chose Lombardia (northwest Italy), where the party governs several medium-sized and small towns (Passarelli and Tuorto, 2018). For the RN, we selected the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA, southeast France), where the RN found its first and most stable anchorage (Gombin, 2009). Two medium-sized towns in which the two parties hold power are pseudonymised respectively as Ville (French case) and Città (Italian case).

In both cities, the parties recently gained local power: the Front national (FN) ¹ in 2014 (later reconfirmed in 2020) and the Lega in 2017 (not reconfirmed in 2021). Despite different local political traditions, their accession benefitted from a similar political situation. Ville was already favourable in terms of electoral scores and sociocultural legitimacy (Gombin, 2009). However, this consensus did not lead to FN’s rule until the local mainstream right’s long stability was undermined by several, major juridical investigations; these revealed a historically embedded problem of clientelism and corruption in the region (Mucchielli and Raquet, 2021). Similarly, the Municipality of Città was won following the arrest of the former mayor due to minor financial investigations (concluded with the acquittal of all individuals involved); these had limited scope but huge resonance in the media. Previously, local power was consistently held by a moderate, Catholic centre-left party, who represented the relatively wealthy local middle and upper classes.

The case studies combine different data collection techniques: first, 6 months of ethnographic observation of public life were conducted in the two towns (cultural and political events), between June 2021 and February 2022 in the case of Ville, and for Città, between March and October 2022. This was followed by in depth-interviews with party members, including the municipal teams, and allies from other political forces governing the municipality (20 in Città and 15 in Ville); and in-depth interviews with the most relevant exponents of the local progressive civil society (10 in Città and 15 in Ville). Party members were chosen for their role in the municipalities or in the internal organisation of the party, while attempting to ensure diversity according to gender, age, length of presence in the party, and social class (by selecting activists from different professional backgrounds). Civil society participants came from diverse formal and informal groups involved in various civic activities – excluding political parties, to keep the focus on civil society. Semi-structured interviews covered, for party members, their personal history of political activism, the party’s strategy of local rooting and governance, and views on the party’s future. For civil society actors, they involved civic engagement, the group’s history in relation to the context, and their views about the impact of the party’s rise and new power position in the town. ²

Before presenting the research results, a final epistemological note is necessary. Ethnography does not seek statistical generalisability, but rather the transferability of results as processes that can be extended across contexts. The heuristic strength of thick description (Geertz, 1973) lies in its ability to illuminate such processes. Thanks to prolonged fieldwork, several socio-spatial elements emerged. By considering the two towns as whole units of analysis, the study encompassed not only neighbourhood divisions and the political management of space, but also the spatial organisation of collective life, along with sensory perceptions (Pink, 2009) and their affective and atmospheric resonances (Gherardi, 2019; Thrift, 2004). This holistic approach enabled the ethnographer to identify robust and pervasive connections between the forms of power regulation, party rooting, and civic opposition, as they relate to space, spatiality, and the construction of a distinct ‘place character’ (Molotch et al., 2000).

Entrenchment in the place: Localism and democratic erosion

As anticipated, our findings show that in both cases the local victory of the two parties has ended a long political cycle characterised by strong continuity of power, as well as financial scandals and judicial investigations into corruption and clientelism. Despite this similarity, the parties’ relationships with their contexts are very different. In the French case, in line with the conservative political subculture of the region (Veugelers, 2019), the RN is largely normalised (Bellè and Faury, 2025). The municipal elections of 2014 constituted an important step on the FN’s road to the mainstream (Almeida, 2019), and Ville became the most important local ‘window dressing’ for the party.

Leaders and militants connect the party’s new access to power to the sociohistorical peculiarities of the context. On the one hand is the crisis of the socialist hegemony in the region, which began in the 1980s. On the other is the area’s long military history (Bayle, 2014), combined with the widespread presence of the pieds-noirs (European inhabitants and settlers in Algeria) after Algeria gained independence in 1962. This nurtured a militarist and authoritarian culture of colonial regret (Veugelers, 2019).

The first reason for success is the mayor. He was born here. He grew up here. He went to school and worked here. He is what we call a ‘son of the soil’ [enfant du pays]. This is very Provençal. The son of the soil who presents himself for the supreme mandate of managing the city. And the inhabitants are sensitive to that. (Simon, RN municipal team, Ville)

The second main element that emerged from the interviews, as exemplified by the above excerpt, is localism – understood to be a new identitarian glue mobilised by the party. The branch performs in a local key the classic theme of nationalism that, in line with the party’s recent ‘strategy of territorialisation’ (Ivaldi and Dutozia, 2018), undergoes a process of rescaling and ‘folklorisation’ (with the mayor as the ‘native of the region’ par excellence, embodying the Provençalité, Provençal identity).

Accounts from the Lega show an opposite tendency, reflecting instead a sense of isolation and minority in the local context:

The last time, we won the city basically because it was our turn. The former mayor was on trial. […] The city is in the hands of the Church and of the centre-left. Basically, it is a Catho-communist town. […] The people who matter here are always of the left. You see there [indicating the other side of the main square], it is an important notary’s office, leftist. And that pharmacy on the other side of the square? He was a candidate for the centre-left in the 1990s. (Giulio, Lega’s municipal team, Città)

Almost all the militants mentioned local attachment as the party’s deepest identity core; they stressed its fundamental relevance for the Lega, even after the nationalist turn. Notably, the local party branch shows a unified opposition to Salvini’s nationalist turn. Its leaders and most dedicated activists – socialised during the Lega Nord and the Padanian era, when the party was focusing on ethno-federalism and regionalism of the North – acknowledge their political and emotional ties to that legacy. This reveals the party’s organisational complexity, amid its most radical transformation and the coexistence of distinct identity cores (Bordieri, 2023). However, consistent with a leader-focused, hierarchical political culture (Zulianello, 2021), this critique does not result in genuine political conflict with the central leadership.

The narratives regarding the relationship between the party and the town emphasise the spatial dimension of this sense of marginality – as can be observed in the above excerpt, where the town’s main square becomes the theatre and the spatial metaphor for the domination by local centre-left notables, as well as of the party’s isolation.

In accordance with research highlighting the polarising role of PRR parties (Harteveld et al., 2022), especially concerning the contentious dynamics of progressive civil society (Meier et al., 2025), strong tensions are evident in both towns. Our data reveal notable similarities in the two parties’ illiberal attitudes towards civil society and associative networks, which have significant spatial implications.

Right after the elections they revoked the municipal room habitually used by the Forum for Peace, which is a sort of network that reunites several non-profit associations working on solidarity, an ethical economy, cooperation, and similar – all things that the Lega perceives as leftist. (Maymun, Civic Committee on the School Canteens Affair, Città)

Some months before the win of the RN in 2014, the former assessor for social affairs called me on the phone and told me, ‘Look, maybe the RN is about to win. I want to donate your branch [a municipal property given to the association] to the Intermunicipal Council.’ […] And when they won, we saw the municipal assessors arriving right here [at the association’s headquarters]. So, they told me we had to move further away because we are too near to the city. I replied that if we move a little more, we end up in the nearby town… They answered, ‘Listen, in any case, the property of the house is municipal, and we want it back.’ And then I had a short moment of very intense, inner joy in saying to them, ‘Maybe I am wrong, but I have the impression that the house is property of the Intermunicipal Council.’ (Michelle, charity association, Ville)

In both cases, the parties’ strategy seems to be aimed at delegitimising and weakening the presence of civic actors who are perceived to be hostile. The question of places, both physical and symbolic, plays a fundamental role in this process. Indeed, the main element of this delegitimisation attitude consists in depriving (or trying to deprive) associations of their headquarters (the story of Michelle, president of one of the area’s most important charitable associations, is not an isolated case).

The commonality of the parties’ strategies is accompanied by significant differences. In the RN’s case, along with hostility towards the ‘leftists’, there is a parallel effort to consolidate alternative relationships with the local associative network. This includes replacements in top positions, encouraging the creation of new ‘friendly’ associations, and general attention towards the associative world. In the case of Città, the punitive attitude has instead spread to the entire local associative network without great distinction, and even extended to depriving the city orchestra of its rehearsal room. This attitude, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, confirms and exacerbates the party’s sociocultural isolation in the town, and its limited capacity to weave alternative relations with civil society.

However, it should be noted that the Lega also seeks to promote hegemonic processes, albeit of a very different character. In line with the party’s trend of radicalisation in recent years (Barcella, 2022; Bellè and Donà, 2022), the local branch also started endorsing the neo-fascist right through various public initiatives and actions. For instance, they took part in the ‘Feast of Liberation from Communism’ organised by the post-fascist Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia), part of the coalition in the local administration:

Another controversy was that of naming a street after Sergio Ramelli [an extreme right militant, assaulted in 1975 by an extreme left group]. Many of the neo-fascist associations were present at the city council session that decided on the dedication. They celebrated it by making Roman salutes in the small room behind the council chamber, not in public… The issue is not so much Ramelli himself, who was a 19-year-old boy, but what Ramelli represents to these groups today. What was obviously feared was that dedicating a street to him might turn it into a sort of place of worship and veneration. […] Recently there was also the naming of a new park after Norma Cossetto, again following a pattern typical of all cities where they govern. (Michele, Civic Committee on the School Canteens Affair)

In addition to endorsing political initiatives with a clear neo-fascist tendency, the municipal administration is attempting to re-semantise the local toponymy and odonymy. Sergio Ramelli was a young militant of the Fronte della Gioventù (Youth Front), the youth organisation of the neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano. His death in Milan in 1975, aged 19, due to an ambush by militants of the security squad (servizo d'ordine) of an extraparliamentary far-left organisation (Avanguardia Operaia, Workers' Vanguard), made him one of the most celebrated figures of the neo- and post-fascist pantheon of martyrs. Norma Cossetto was an Italian student from Istria who was killed in 1943 by Yugoslav partisans at the Villa Surani foiba, in Istria. The so-called foibe massacres – named after potholes in the ground present in the region, where bodies were thrown – refer to war crimes committed by Yugoslav and, to a small extent, Italian communist partisans (Bernardi, 2019). In the narrative of the Italian far right, the foibe epitomise a ‘war of memory’ (Focardi, 2020), to the extent that they are narrated as a sort of ‘Italian holocaust’ (Bernardi, 2019: 479).

Returning to the specific case of Città, the question of the links between public spaces and places, collective memory, ideology, and institutionalisation has other, interesting implications. The same area that has now become Norma Cossetto’s Park, located in a working-class neighbourhood on the edge of the city centre, had in previous years sparked a bitter political clash, as a city mosque was to be built there. The Lega, then in opposition, organised a tough campaign of protest, in line with the European PRR’s pattern of dealing with Islamic places of worship (Gravelle et al., 2021). The project was then abandoned by the centre-left administration. Thus, if we shift our gaze from the present to the recent past, we see how the park represents the outcome of a long concatenation of conflicts over the naming and definition of public places, related to collective memory, politics, and political institutions.

Constructing ‘the others’: Spatial exclusion and bordering practices

We now turn to two public controversies that have proved extremely significant in the two cities, through inflaming the public debate and prompting a strong mobilisation of progressive civil society. Both events call into question, once again, the spatial dimension and the meaning-making process that turns spatial elements into place(s).

Beginning with the French case, the dispute refers to the closure of some social centres (centres sociaux) – welfare structures financed partly by the state and partly by subnational institutions, including municipalities, which provide social and educational services at the neighbourhood level:

So, in Ville, how did they do it [how did the RN succeed in maintaining their power]? First, they got hold of the social centres. The social centres were mostly municipal. So, they closed some of them […] The mayor said that it was an island of the Socialist Party, because, in fact, these are places where there are people of the left. […] They hired new people. They put it to work for them. […] The place they closed first, it became the police premises. […] All this space has been reused. It has been marked ‘Rassemblement national ’. (Thomas, association of citizens’ vigilance on the democratic life, Ville)

In deciding to close two of the three social centres, as Thomas explains, the party fulfilled two goals: it isolated some critical voices and, simultaneously, achieved cuts in social spending, in line with the party’s liberal approach to welfare provisions (Bellè and Faury, 2025). This policy, formally liberal, is nonetheless racist in essence, and its discriminatory character resides precisely in its spatial connotation. The two social centres closed were located in two quartiers prioritaires (priority neighbourhoods), as areas with low-income levels are defined in France. ³ In turn, in a process of intersectional concatenation, in the two areas the class division is combined with that of ethnicity, as both neighbourhoods have a majoritarian presence of immigrants or French citizens of foreign origin. The racist element of the policy is thus realised indirectly, thanks to the targeted choice of the two centres and their specific collocation in the urban landscape.

In Ville, the PRR’s typical law-and-order approach to poverty and social vulnerability (Wodak, 2015) is evident. The party’s securitarian response seeks the physical removal of these types of ‘undesired’ people from public space. Ville itself is marked by strong ethnic and class boundaries, which create a fragmented and hierarchical social space, as reflected in its spatial organisation. Larger than Paris intramuros, Ville is a town designed for cars, with public transport struggling to connect its extended 12 neighbourhoods. The small historic centre, though characterful, has declined socioeconomically since the 1970s due to large shopping centres in newly constructed areas replacing small businesses. Residential zones include two middle- and upper-class districts, alongside two segregated neighbourhoods of immigrants and French citizens of foreign origin, who face high social vulnerability – unemployment, school dropouts, low incomes, deteriorating high-rises, and scarce public services. Moreover, Ville’s life is deeply marked by strong seasonality, which shapes its socio-spatial fabric through a pronounced dualism. The coastal area attracts tourists and is thriving economically, while the city centre remains empty, economically deprived, and disconnected from the seaside both socially and urbanistically.

Even in the small-scale context of Ville, we observe forms of ghettoisation similar to those found in metropolitan areas. This shows how pervasive the problem of socio-spatial confinement and hierarchisation is in the French context (Almeida, 2022):

What did the RN’s administration do? They put more and more cameras on some pillars. They have enclosed more of the neighbourhood. When I go there, I have the feeling of being in a concentration camp. […] They’ve recruited a huge number of former military personnel not trained to work as policemen […]. When I was a local police officer, I was involved in proximity work [...]. (Jean, ex-local policeman, Ville)

I see a solidaristic community: you can’t starve in La Douane. You will always have a neighbour bringing you something to eat. They care about each other. […] At school, sometimes the mothers tell me: ‘You did good in the newspaper. Please keep defending us!’ There are children and teenagers there that never go to the beach and yet they live near the sea, but they don’t go. (Annie, association of citizen’s vigilance on the democratic life, Ville)

The neighbourhood of La Douane is one of the two already mentioned quartiers prioritaires (priority neighbourhoods) of Ville, where one of the two social centres was closed. The area has lately become the object of polarised narratives: RN militants regard it as archetypally symbolising fears, threats, and otherisation processes, whereas for the local progressive civil society, it is the living monument of decades of political failures. Importantly, this condition of residential segregation, as is the case in the rest of France, cannot be attributed to the FN/RN, but rather has its roots in long-standing urban policies that have progressively produced and exacerbated the phenomenon (see Almeida, 2021). The party’s rise to power, however, entails the active and deliberate implementation of measures aimed at maintaining and reinforcing such isolation. The RN’s approach is in line with its law-and-order ideological profile, which includes CCTV surveillance, repressive police action, and the abandonment of every attempt to build trustworthy relations with the inhabitants (the ‘proximity work’ mentioned by Jean). In the account from Annie, who works as a teacher at La Dounae, it is interesting to note the distance between ‘the speakers and the spoken’ – in other words, the different abilities to access public discourse, but also public spaces, between La Douane’s inhabitants and the ‘externals’.

Ten years ago in Ville, racists … you hardly heard them or they hid. Now they’re out and loud. You can say to a young girl from North Africa, ‘This is France. Go take off your headscarf.’ It can happen. It happens. (Mohammed, professional in the third sector, Ville)

In the background of these confined lives, politics influences the local social fabric. Mohammed describes the progressive loss of collective taboos that has occurred since the RN’s first victory in 2014. Once again, racism unfolds while entangled with other kinds of oppression, such as that of class – due to the interdependency of class and ethnicity, also on a spatial level – and that of gender (as in episodes of aggressive unveilings, where Muslim women are not perceived to be subjects carrying their own, rightful agency). Confirming the findings of recent research (Hancock and Mobillion, 2019), similarly in Ville, young veiled women have become the target of unprecedented forms of public discrimination. The question of the veil in public spaces is historically controversial in France. In the name of the founding values of its democratic system, such as republican universalism and laïcité (secularism), the state has banned its use in public schools by law. Simultaneously, this sign of religious/cultural belonging has started to become the object of public debate, polarisation, and ideological mobilisation from the right (not only radical). The issue has been particularly politicised precisely in the region of Ville, an area with a conservative political tradition and a strong rooting of the FN since the 1990s, where recently several mayors have banned access to beaches and public swimming pools for women wearing the so-called ‘burkini’, giving rise to a campaign of moral panic (Leconte, 2022).

We turn now to the major controversy observed in Città, which relates to public schools, access to welfare rights, and immigrants, as described by the interviewees. Briefly after its election, the new Lega administration changed the municipal rules for accessing reduced tariffs for school buses and canteens, by asking non-EU immigrant families with children in public primary schools and kindergartens to produce documentation attesting to their economic status in their countries of origin. According to the party, several of these families received reductions for school canteens and buses, but some might own wealth and properties abroad. The new rule appeared inapplicable from the start, as many of the required documents are not routinely issued in the countries of origin. Yet the municipality persisted. Without the documentation, families were automatically charged the highest rate for canteen and bus services. The main effect was to exclude children from these basic services, thus creating forms of exclusion and, in some cases, even the physical confinement of those with non-Italian origins outside the canteens. Progressive civil society mobilised to form a committee of 46 actors, including: immigrant associations; solidaristic and non-profit groups; anti-fascist organisations; national NGOs working on peace, solidarity, and anti-racism; political parties and civic lists (the Democratic Party and a leftist civic list). The network also held demonstrations in Città’s main square, where the city hall is located, and launched a national online fundraiser for affected families. The committee also appointed a legal representative and lodged an appeal against the new regulation, which won in two of the three levels of judgment in the Italian legal system. These two defeats led the Municipality to withdraw the regulation.

The ‘canteens affair’ highlights a process of spatialisation of ideology that differs from the ghettoisation of Ville. In Città, discrimination was enacted not by segregating ‘undesirable others’ in separate spaces, but by engineering differential access to a quintessential public of citizenship, the education system. In this process of exclusion, the interviewees recounted how lunchtime had become a severe internal rift in everyday school life. From a regulatory standpoint, it is unclear whether students were allowed to eat a meal brought from home within the area of the cafeteria. This led to differing decisions by school principals and, in some cases, to the physical segregation of children outside the shared cafeteria areas.

There were families who lived far from school, with children to be picked up for lunch and the commute to be done on foot, perhaps along busy, dangerous roads with cars passing by. (Hassan, Civic Committee on the School Canteens Affair, Città)

The residence’s distance from the school exacerbated the already difficult situations, with intersectional implications that call into question families’ economic status, since the proximity of housing to schooling is an indicator of economic and social well-being (Metz, 2015).

It should also be noted that this specific case, despite its great media attention, is not an isolated one. Although the topic is still under-researched, scholars have noted that in Italy a process of ‘residentialisation of citizenship rights’ has been underway for at least two decades (Gargiulo, 2023). One of the main actor of this democratic erosion has been precisely the Lega, which, in the name of a federalist and localist project, has implemented such measures at both municipal and regional levels (Bellè, 2025). Access to local welfare becomes dependent mostly on two bureaucratic exclusion criteria. One is the number of years of residence: below a certain threshold (usually 5 years), access is denied. The second is the global non-property criterion (impossidenza globale): non-EU immigrant families must provide documentation certifying the absence of assets in their countries of origin. As explained by the lawyer who followed the case, part of a national association defending immigrants’ rights: ‘Even if it is unconstitutional, they keep trying. They are always bound to lose unless they change the Constitution, but it is clear there is a political will to change the perception of citizenship rights, to dismantle their universal character.’

Discussion and conclusion

This paper has aimed to analyse local rooting, the management of administrative power, and the opposition from progressive local civil society in two middle-sized towns governed by the Rassemblement national and the Lega Salvini Premier, by adopting a space- and place-related approach. First, we focused on the parties’ ideologisation of ‘the local’ according to a reactionary and native organicism (the anti-modern and anti-cosmopolitan Gemeinschaft). In line with recent debates on the polysemous concept of localism in relation to the PRR (Arzheimer and Bernemann, 2023), we individuated two different tendencies and paths. In the case of the RN governing Ville, the card of local belonging is used to legitimise the new access to municipal power obtained by the party from 2014 onwards, thus conveying an image of deradicalisation and institutional respectability (Bellè and Faury, 2025). This, in turn, is strategically significant from the perspective of achieving the long-sought national power by a party that has been consistently excluded for decades through the cordon sanitaire practice (Paxton, 2023). The RN’s localism in Ville is aimed at the folklorisation of aspects of local culture and traditions, within a ‘native’ and ultimately exclusionist ideological discourse (Almeida, 2019). This form of exclusionary localism is also imbued with populist elements, given the party’s emphasis on a direct and unmediated connection with ‘the (local) people’, embodied and performed by the leading figure of the mayor; this can be understood as a performative embodiment of this local folklore.

In the case of Città we find at work a different type of exclusionary localism, long part of the party’s ideological baggage, that we might call ‘technical-bureaucratic’. Leveraging the use of regulations, the party implements policies of welfare chauvinism, nativism, and exclusion on a local basis. This operation is in line with the politics and policies carried out by the old, ethno-federalist Northern League over the past three decades, on multiple territorial levels; yet it remains severely under-researched (see Ambrosini et al., 2024; Bellè, 2025). It is noteworthy that the historical ethno-federalist paradigm of the party, which shaped subnational policies, was not fundamentally challenged by its national shift (Barcella, 2022; Zulianello, 2021). The rescaling of the same nativist and exclusionist paradigm is evident in how these locally rooted strategies – originally applied by the Lega Nord in northern Italy – have been easily exported elsewhere in the country, as well as at the national level when the party has been in power (Bellè, 2025). We believe that both dimensions of local exclusionism, the folkloric and the technical-bureaucratic, are fundamental to the analysis of the PRR in local power, and can be found elsewhere, either singularly or in combination.

Furthermore, our analysis highlights robust links between the use of localism and our second research focus, namely the role of space and place in the production of discourses and policies of exclusion. In this regard, again, the two cases reveal different connotations. In Ville, exclusion predominantly takes the form of further isolating already ghettoised ‘undesirable others’ within specific urban spaces. The exclusionary form of the ghetto is linked to France’s longstanding problems of urban planning policies with segregating effects, which, in turn, are linked to a complex postcolonial legacy. As clarified, these processes of segregation were not implemented by the FN/RN, neither throughout France nor in our case study; rather, they reflect decades of urban development policies realised by several political actors (Almeida, 2021). The FN’s rise to power in the town, however, builds upon these pre-existing forms of segregation through the implementation of highly ideological goals – such as the closure of social centres precisely in poor and ethnically segregated areas, and the tightening of law and order measures. The party’s accession to power thus exacerbates already existing forms of isolation and exclusion. Moreover, Ville’s urban morphology incentivises ghettoisation due to the town’s highly fragmented socio-spatial composition. This finding is particularly relevant to the debate on space, place, and the PRR in local government, as it shows how, through a spatialisation of policies, it is possible to implement a discriminatory, nativist and exclusionist agenda – not by explicitly declaring such aims, but by spatialising (and thereby targeting) the policies concerned.

By contrast, in the case of Città, the movement of exclusion consists not in confining ‘the others’ to a separate place, but in complicating their access to a major place of citizenship-building, namely the agorà of public schools. This strategy, although involving a different process, is ultimately meant to achieve the same exclusionary outcome as in Ville. Moreover, the ‘canteens affair’ is paradigmatic of the Lega’s political history, with the aforementioned strategy of localising welfare and the punitive use of administrative power proving to be anything but ideologically neutral or deradicalised.

Construction of the local ‘small homeland’ is not limited to the bordering of ‘undesirable others’, but also targets progressive civil society organisations. The two case studies show impressive analogies: namely, the same democratic backsliding on the part of the two administrations. As we have seen, the issue of space plays a key role in this process of delegitimising civic opposition, primarily through the subtraction of physical places. In this way, the two municipalities not only punish critical voices, but also make them disappear from the urban landscape, while redesigning ‘the place’ according to the parties’ agenda and values. This erasure is accompanied by the parallel endorsement of civic actors close to the parties – a process that is strongly spatially connoted too. From the social centre transformed into police headquarters in Ville, to the naming of squares and parks after leading figures of the neo-fascist pantheon in Città, the struggle for hegemony also (and not secondarily) passes through ‘toponymic and odonymic strategies’, as well as operations of ‘ideological urban redesigning', resulting in a highly ideologised transition from space to place.

Our final reflection concerns the role of progressive civil societies in our two local cases, and the impact of their mobilisation against the two administrations. Drawing on recent contributions (Arzheimer and Bernemann, 2023; Bolet, 2021; Meier et al., 2025), we adopted a spatial lens to analyse contentious dynamics, particularly through the concept of ‘place character’ (Meier et al., 2025; Molotch et al., 2000). In our cases, the place character of the two towns has significantly shaped contentious dynamics and their development. In Ville, decades of speculative urban development had degraded the social and environmental fabric; seasonal tourism deeply impacted the local economy, planning, and sociality. The lack of public spaces for inter-class interaction reinforced existing social anomy. Altogether, these socio-spatial elements have made Ville a fragmented, socially segregated, hierarchical place. In contrast, Città remains urbanistically compact and socially vital, where public spaces support civic and solidaristic traditions.

This contribution shows how these spatial aspects are far from being anecdotal and, rather, deserve to be taken into account more systematically, as proper agentic factors, when analysing the growth of the PRR in relation to classic deprivation and social isolation theories (Bolet, 2021), as well as mobilisation and polarisation processes. The question of how the PRR’s growth is linked to individual and collective loneliness, fragmentation, and individualisation of urban life, must also consider the socio-material assemblage of spaces and places, and their impact on the forms of human coexistence.

Moreover, our empirical analysis shows that the concept of place character is not only applicable to civil society’s role in opposing (or not opposing) the PRR. It is also intrinsic to the rooting process of the PRR itself, for two distinct reasons. First, PRR parties, much like civic actors, must contend with a specific place character, which is the result of prior sociopolitical, cultural, urbanistic and geographical processes. Second, these parties – particularly when in power – act as active agents in the construction and transformation of that place character, and implement policies with significant socio-spatial impact.

These research results, circumscribed as they are, are therefore meant to encourage more systematic attention to space and place – as well as greater interdisciplinary dialogue between political sociology and science, urban studies, political geography, and social movements studies – in research on the rise of the contemporary populist radical right.