"We mustn't fool ourselves"
'Orbánian' discourse in the political battle over the refugee crisis and European identity
The historic wave of refugees reaching Europe in 2015 was met with a volatile
mixture of ethno-nationalist, anti-Muslim fearmongering and political infighting
within the European Union (EU). Perhaps no one was more influential in
promulgating fear and anti-refugee sentiment than Viktor Orbán, the Prime
Minister of Hungary, whose inflammatory rhetoric and uncompromising, illiberal
political stance helped escalate the refugee-crisis in a discursive battle
of political wills, ideologies, and identity politics within the EU. This paper
explores how Orbán employs political discourse practices and strategies to enact his right-wing populist (RWP) ideology and anti-immigrant ‘politics of fear’
(Wodak 2015) vis-à-vis EU politicians’ pro-migration discourses. Adopting a
broad critical discourse-analytic approach, we demonstrate Orbán’s iterative
production of discourses of threat and defense underlying discourses of fear (law
and order, cultural/religious difference), and discourses of oppositional political
identities and ideologies through fractal recursion. We argue that recursive
performance of RWP stances creates a recognizable political style characteristic
of Orbán’s RWP political persona or type.
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Brusenbauch Meislová, Monika & Dan Marek
2023.
‘It’s the EU’s fault!’ Strategies of blame avoidance in Andrej Babiš’s discourse on the conflict-of-interest case.
European Politics and Society 24:3
► pp. 392 ff.
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