Post-Truth Narratives in European Parliamentary Debates: Migration and Beyond

In an era marked by the ascendancy of post-truth politics, the boundaries between evidence-based deliberations and misleading narratives that challenge and subvert existing epistemic authorities have increasingly blurred. This chapter explores how post-truth narratives influence political debates on migration in several European countries. Drawing on comparative analyses of parliamentary debates in Poland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, France, and the European Parliament from 2009 to 2024, it identifies how misinformation, selective framing, and emotionally charged rhetoric seek to shape migration policies and public perceptions. By employing a novel Argumentative Discourse Analysis framework, the chapter categorizes post-truth structures into three levels—trivial, popular, and deep—each reflecting varying degrees of narrative institutionalization in political discourse. A key finding is that post-truth narratives, once they are embedded in public discourse, challenge the foundations of liberal democracy by normalizing misinformation, undermining expert knowledge, and polarizing public discourse. The analysis also demonstrates how such narratives permeate debates beyond illiberal factions, influencing mainstream political actors from the political centre and thereby ultimately affecting actual policymaking. Crucially, we observe that post-truth narratives is more strongly and deeply institutionalized the more and the longer a country’s shared public space has been under attack and as a result has begun to deteriorate. As such, this chapter contributes to a broader understanding of the mechanisms through which post-truth narratives reshape democratic deliberation in liberal democracies. At the same time, it urges societies and decisionmakers to develop novel formats to educate the public, to proactively (re)establish commonly accepted fora for discussion and deliberation and to aggressively oppose propagators of post-truth as well as their narratives