Abstract

The vaccine-related discourse has dominated the traditional and digital mediatic system with the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to a state of infodemic. So, pandemic politics has occurred, in which far-right parties exploit the vaccine issue to attack their political opponents. The paper analyses the social media political communication of the Italian far-right populist parties, highlighting how they generate mistrust towards vaccination campaigns and public institutions, with the risk of undermining the effectiveness of the vaccination plan and virus containment policies. Preliminary findings also detect convergence and divergence between European far-right populists’ communication strategies. This analysis leans on empirical materials extracted from a sample of no. 8 far-right populist leaders’ Facebook posts from 1 March 2020 to 31 December 2021. Results confirm a double trend in their stances on the Covid-19 vaccine, which represents a highly politicized issue in a growing polarized scenario.