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Imagining the Peoples of Europe: Populist discourses across the political spectrum
Edited by Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 83] 2019
► pp. 173–200

Chapter 7
Performing ‘the people’?

The populist style of politics in the German PEGIDA-movement

This chapter analyses the construction of the people (das Volk) in the populist style of politics as performed in the German PEGIDA-movement. Pointing at the ambiguities of the term in the German political post-unification discourse, he demonstrates how PEGIDA traces its legacy back to the GDR citizen movement and to the idea of resistance against a dictatorial system still awaiting a final redemption. PEGIDA presents Das Volk as the legitimate representative of the German population, threatened in its very existence by the machinations of a toxic combination of evil-minded domestic elites and trans-national migration. Önnerfors locates the linguistic and performative strategies of PEGIDA within a larger European New Right (ENR) discourse and argues that it combines elements from mono- and multifascism.

Keywords: post-unification Germany, PEGIDA, das Volk, populism
Article outline
  • Introduction: Who are ‘the people’ in post-unification Germany?
  • Between ‘ethnos´ and ‘demos’ – reflections on the German concept ‘Volk’
  • The development of the contemporary new right discourse in Germany
  • Theoretical and methodological considerations
  • Selection of sources
  • PEGIDA on the public stage
  • Protocols of performativity: Styling ‘the people’ as actor and audience
  • PEGIDA as part of the ENR discourse
  • Note
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 13 August 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.83.08onn
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Önnerfors, Andreas
2020. “Retrotopia” as a Retrogressive Force in the German PEGIDA-Movement. In Nostalgia and Hope: Intersections between Politics of Culture, Welfare, and Migration in Europe [IMISCOE Research Series, ], ► pp. 135 ff. DOI logo

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