At the end of June 2025, the consortium members working on ARENAS Work Package 3 (Circulation of Extremist Narratives) concluded a cycle of webinars on the topic of the circulation of extremist narratives in parliaments. This activity was a specified task set out in the project plan and was led by the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Covering the case studies from the parliaments of Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Finland, France, Poland, Germany, Italy and Spain, members of the work package team, together with external colleagues, had lively discussions about how extremist narratives are used within parliamentary discourse.
The parliament’s long-standing traditions, its operations through formal and informal rules, and its entrenchment in a broader political and social context provide a specific institutional background – one that sets it apart from other environments, like the traditional or social media spaces, and is a crucial player in shaping the everyday life of a particular society.
Within this institutional context, the parliament plays a distinct role in the production and circulation of extremist narratives, which the webinar cycle helped to explore in a comparative perspective. The results of this deliberation will be available to the public through an upcoming report. You can learn more about the work of this Work Package here and download the first of their published results The Historical Roots of Extremist Narratives.
