Agonistic Engagement in Memory Politics: Media Arenas, Normative Orientations, and Debates on Giorno del ricordo in Italy and Slovenia

Giorno del ricordo (February 10), established in Italy in 2004, remains one of the most polarising commemorations in Italy. The day commemorates victims of the post-war killings at the end of the Second World War and in its aftermath (the so-called foibe), as well as the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus following the war. Public debates are frequently structured through antagonistic framings of victimhood, responsibility, and national identity. This article asks whether, despite such polarisation, public discourse still contains agonistic potential, instances in which disagreement is conducted as legitimate contestation among adversaries, rather than as antagonism, in which opponents are cast as enemies to be excluded. To address this question, we develop an LLM-assisted approach to analyse debates in Italy and Slovenia (2022–2024) across X and online news, and complement this analysis with a survey of citizens’ normative orientations toward key agonistic principles. This triangulation enables an assessment of gaps between mediated practices and broader public dispositions. The article contributes a framework for identifying agonistic modes in contested memory debates across media environments and national contexts, and provides a transferable template that can be adapted to other contested commemorations and memory conflicts beyond the Giorno del Ricordo case.