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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. 257–284

Chapter 10
“The people” in the discourse of the Romanian government and opposition

Between populism and the quest for democracy

This article analyzes the discourse of the government and opposition parties in Romania, between 2011 and 2012. It examines the construction of “the people” as a popular subject, by applying both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The results show that the government tended to present “the people” as the only agents responsible for their material well-being, while denying the possibility for them to influence the decisions taken in the political sphere. In contrast, the opposition focused on the representation of the Romanian citizens as voters who have the democratic right to decide their rulers. The opposition parties attributed to the state the responsibility for general prosperity. The opposition constructs an extended chain of equivalences between the demands of various socio-professional categories forming “the people” and a marked dichotomy between “the people” and the governing elites, which are subsequently equated with the communist dictatorship.

Keywords: Romania, populism, Left, Right, inclusion, exclusion, liberalism, social democracy
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background to the case
  • Data selection and methodology
  • Discussion of the quantitative results
  • Defining ‘the people’
    • The cultural dimension of ‘the people’
    • The material dimension
    • The political dimension
  • Defining political actors
  • Conclusions
  • 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 rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 13 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.83.11lev
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