Battling to dominate the discursive terrain: How Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron have framed terrorist incidents in France.

Crises have become the new normal within the Eurozone for nearly a decade. The sovereign debt crisis of 2009 was followed by the migration crisis in 2015, and a series of terrorist attacks. This paper seeks to examine how the issue of terrorism has been framed by Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. Islamist extremists have carried out numerous attacks in France since 2010, and Marine Le Pen has been eager to exploit these incidents since they fit neatly within her xenophobic and nationalist discourse. On the other hand, Emmanuel Macron seeks to transcend traditional political boundaries and foster unity. These different discursive approaches in framing terrorism will be the main focus of this paper. In addition, the paper will also examine if Macron has adopted part of Le Pen’s framing regarding terrorism. By drawing upon the literature on crisis framing the analysis is centred around two important periods: 1) the 2018 Strasbourg attack 2) and the murder of Samuel Paty in 2020. The data was collected from the Twitter accounts of Le Pen and Macron by using the rtweet package of the R programming language, and analysed via the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) generative statistical model. The end result is an in depth analysis that showcases the different discursive strategies of the two case studies regarding terrorism. Most importantly, Le Pen’s discourse remained one dimensional during the two time periods focusing almost exclusively on migration and national security, while Macron’s addressed a broader spectrum of issues like the climate crisis and the economic revitalisation of the Eurozone during the Covid 19 crisis.