This article explores the capacity of ‘territorialising threats’ expressed by nationalist populist parties by reinventing and replicating the geopolitical ability to speak in territorial terms exploiting emergencies to advance nationalistic claims. The paper focuses on the Italian case exploring the narratives and political positions on borders and sovereignty adopted by the Lega party during 2019, when the ‘crisis’ was related to migration flows, and in the first half of 2020, when the Covid-19 emergency reached its first peak in Italy. The aim is to contribute to the effort of political geographers to unveil the spatial methods of nationalist populism.