The Politics of Belonging: Gendered Identity and Populist Exclusion in France, Germany and Italy

This paper examines the discursive construction of collective belonging and exclusion in contemporary European populist discourse, focusing on the strategic role of gendered identity. Drawing on a trilingual corpus of political speeches and written texts in German, French, and Italian, the study explores how populist actors mobilise emotional appeals – particularly fear, anger, and resentment – towards perceived external groups. Gender emerges as a central rhetorical resource through which political speakers position themselves ideologically, reinforce in-group cohesion, and demarcate symbolic boundaries between “us” and “them.” The analysis is grounded in corpus-based discourse linguistics and draws on data from the Political Language Repository (Po.La.R.), an AI-enhanced multilingual corpus of non-institutional political communication. Findings show that right-wing populist movements such as the Alternative für Deutschland frame gender equality and inclusive language as ideological threats linked to moral decline. In the French context, gender is articulated through processes of self- and hetero-designation, as illustrated by the rhetoric of Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour. Comparative references to Italian discourse further highlight how identity labels function as populist tools of belonging. Overall, the study argues that gender is central to populist identity politics and exclusionary worldviews in Europe.