Contagious Dissent: Radical Right Spillover and Anti-Vaccine Mobilization. Insights from the Italian Case

Abstract

Despite growing scholarly attention to radical right responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, we still know relatively little about how radical right actors interacted with and influenced the broader anti-vaccination and anti-Green Pass movement. This article addresses this gap by examining the relationship between radical right actors and the wider protest arena in Italy, a critical case of anti-restriction mobilization in Europe. Building on a social movement perspective, we conceptualize the radical right as a heterogeneous field of interconnected collective and individual actors operating across the boundaries between institutional and contentious politics. Drawing on a mixed-methods design that combines a protest event analysis (PEA) of 157 protest events reported in the Italian press (2021–2022) with 23 semi-structured interviews with activists, movement leaders, and experts, we analyze how radical right actors mobilized, interacted with other protest actors, and adapted their strategies throughout the protest cycle. The findings show that the pandemic created new opportunities for organizational and discursive spillover between the radical right and the broader anti-vaccination movement. Radical right actors contributed to shaping protest frames, became increasingly embedded in protest networks, and diversified their repertoires of contention through a functional division of labor between more confrontational and more conventional actors. At the same time, these interactions were contingent on local political contexts and generated both opportunities for cooperation and constraints on radical right mobilization. More broadly, the pandemic functioned as a critical juncture that expanded the radical right's ideological repertoire beyond its traditional focus on nationalism, immigration, and ethnicity to include public health governance, scientific authority, and epistemic distrust.