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Migration has actually gained considerable relevance both in the public and political debate, which in some cases has been associated with a strengthening of nationalist sentiments calling into question the European Union membership. Migration was one of the most relevant topics of the political debate during the French and Italian electoral campaigns, also thanks to the role played by the social media, which has solicited the electoral consensus on the idea that migration may be a risk factor for citizens. In order to analyze the representation and the sentiment on migration characterizing the political debate during the electoral campaign in France and Italy, we collected two samples of messages, in both languages, containing the word migrant produced in the period preceding the vote from the Twitter repository. The messages were collected in two large size corpora, which underwent the Emotional Text Mining. The results comparison shows that Italian and French messages are similar concerning some issues (work, security, exploitation, solidarity) but differ in the sentiment intensity, which is mainly negative in Italy. Finally, if it seems possible to identify a close connection between the election result and the issues debated in France, this association seems less evident in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Futuribles is the property of Futuribles SARL and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses science as a campaign issue in the 2012 French presidential election between sitting president Nicolas Sarkozy and his challenger François Hollande. The author notes that neither candidate has made science a top campaign issue. She discusses the division among the French scientific community regarding the Sarkozy's research and higher education policy and Hollande's plans to overturn France's stem cell law, which bans research on embryonic stem cells.