The political landscape in Europe is currently going through a phase of rapid change. New actors and movements that claim to represent 'the will of the people' are attracting considerable public attention, with dramatic consequences for election outcomes. This volume explores the new political order with a particular focus on discursive constructions of 'the people' and the category of populism across the spectrum. It shows how a unitary representation of 'the people' is a central element in a vast range of very diverse political discourses today, acting to anchor identities and project antagonisms in a multitude of settings. The chapters in this book explore commonality and contrast in representations of ‘the people’ in both radical and mainstream political movements, looking in depth at recent political discourses in the European sphere. The authors draw on approaches ranging from Essex-style discourse theory over critical discourse studies, corpus analysis and linguistic pragmatics, to investigate how historically situated categories such as the people and populism become fixed through local linguistic, textual and narrative practices as well as through wider ideological and discursive patterns.
As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
Aiming to provide some theoretical context to this edited volume on Imagining the Peoples of Europe, this chapter argues that a discourse-theoretical definition of populism as a political logic is the best basis for discursive analyses of populist politics. In identifying what makes populist politics across the political spectrum populist, the chapter strongly builds on Laclau’s work. But it more explicitly limits populism to a particular political logic that revolves around the claim to represent ‘the people’, discursively constructed through a down/up opposition between the people-as-underdog and ‘the elite’ as a small and illegitimately powerful group that is argued not to satisfy the needs and demands of the people. This definition also emphasizes how populism constructs not only ‘the people’ but also ‘the elite’, and how it presents certain demands as the will of the people. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the proposed definition’s implications for the empirical analysis of populist politics across the political spectrum, suggesting that we need to analyze the ways in which populists construct the down/up opposition between ‘people’ and ‘elite’ as well as how this opposition is articulated with other elements of populists’ particular programs and strategies.
Most works on populism framed in a discourse-analytic perspective focus on the features of populist discourse itself, contributing greatly to the understanding of the phenomenon. However, a full understanding of populism should also consider the ways in which notions of populism are constructed, negotiated, reproduced, and popularised in public discourse, as this contributes greatly to forming public opinion at large and peoples responses to populism itself. For this reason, the chapter addresses discourses about populism, with a focus on editorials dealing with Brexit in the British and Italian press. Although their position of supremacy in orienting public opinion has been partly mined by talk shows, blogs, and social media at large, opinion pieces remain one of the most important sites in which intellectuals (generally senior journalists) publicly share their views trying at the same time to influence the opinion of the readers. Based on an original framework integrating categories from critical discourse studies, argumentation theory, and the study of heteroglossia/dialogism, the analysis focuses on the ways in which editorialists define and evaluate populism and populists, the argumentative topoi they employ to support their standpoints, and whether and how they engage alternative viewpoints. In our view, all these aspects concur to expand or reduce the space of dialogue created by the text, and hence, we claim, the ability of the readers to feel included, and see their positions represented, in the broader discussion. The risk is that if no dialogue is opened at all with the people who uphold populist views, intellectual discourse will fail to involve them as interlocutors in a critical discussion, thus making them more receptive (or vulnerable) to populist propaganda.
In this chapter, we compare the discourse of Podemos and Movimento Cinque Stelle in order to answer the following question: to what extent do these movements pertain to the same political phenomenon? Based on Laclau’s definition of populism, we provide a “snapshot” of both parties’ discourse between 2012 and 2016 by carrying out a corpus-based analysis that combines lexicography and metaphor analysis. The results show that they display a populist logic and represent two counter-discourses against neoliberal hegemony. However, they also display important differences that could prove to be decisive when it comes to seizing political power and building an alternative to the hegemonic order they challenge, as their recent evolutions have shown.
This study focuses the Islamic/conservative populism of the Justice and the Development Party (AKP) in Turkey. Drawing on the post-structuralist discourse-theoretical perspective developed by Ernesto Laclau, it demonstrates how the populist discourse of the AKP substantially changed in this period through fluctuations in the boundaries that separated ‘the people’ from ‘the power’ as well as the components of both of these categories. While ‘the people’ signifier initially acted as an empty signifier that represented a series of unfulfilled social demands against ‘the power’ – the institutional system – that negated these demands, it gradually came to signify Islamic/conservative demands against all those opposing the AKP. This transformation involved a move from a relatively inclusive and democratic populism to an exclusive and authoritarian one.
This chapter focuses on the construction of pueblo ‘people’ and patria ‘homeland’ in the Spanish discourse of Podemos and the party’s relation to la gente ‘the people’ between June 2016 and its second political conference, Vistalegre II (February 2017). The discursive analysis focuses on figures of speech, such as synecdoche and metaphors, followed by a narrative analysis. The data cover the General Secretary of the party, Pablo Iglesias and the head of the branch in Catalonia, Xavier Domènech. We then apply the explanatory logics developed within discourse theory (Glynos and Howarth 2007) to interpret the results of the analysis1 and we critically reflect on some observed ambiguities in the discourse of Podemos.
In the Danish context, populism is usually associated with the radical right-wing. However, the left-wing Red-Green Alliance (the RGA), which defines itself as socialist, has carried out a populist turn coinciding with a remarkable electoral growth from 2.2% in 2007 to 7.8% in 2015. I argue that the RGA presents a hybrid form of left-wing populism in which socialist and populist articulations converge. The discourse is socialist since equality (or struggle against inequality) is the main value; the materialist approach is dominant; and there are plenty of references to class, working-class and class struggles. It is populist in the sense that inequality is portrayed as a conflict against the elite; and there is an attempt to constitute a new collective subject named “community”. Moreover, the RGA’s opposition towards the EU connects with the populist resistance to global neoliberalism and the defense of national sovereignty.
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.
Who are the people? As a semantically underspecified noun, the lexeme “people” and related terms such as “citizen(s)” or “constituent(s)” lead to various representations and are filled with competing meanings. By undertaking a cross-linguistic analysis of the semantic value of nouns denoting human referents in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, this paper investigates how the “people” (people in English, Volk in German, peuple in French) and related linguistic expressions (notably Mensch, Bürger, citoyen) are discursively staged in national parliamentary debates on Europe.
The people represent the entity Members of Parliament (MPs) speak to, about, and on behalf of. In political sciences, mentioning the people immediately raises concerns about a populist message or stance. To which extent, then, does the reference to “the people” or “a people” pertain to a populist stance?
Based on an annotated corpus of forty-four national parliamentary debates between 1998 and 2015, this paper uses mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) to assess how the “people” are referred to across the political spectrum in the British House of Commons, the German Bundestag and the French Assemblée nationale. By taking into account a large amount of speakers across different times and cultures, the analysis shows that the reference to “the people” – partly in opposition to “a people” – is a basic component of political discourse, thus indicating that the mere mention of the “people” cannot be regarded as a feature of populist rhetoric.
Right wing populism has always been exclusionary in nature and relies on classic positive in-group/negative out-group constructions (van Dijk 1998). This chapter investigates how the UK Independence Party (UKIP) discursively constructed ‘the people’ during the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum campaign. It will be argued that ‘the people’ were defined in opposition to two key groups: Elite mainstream political actors and migrants. The consequence of this strategy has been the legitimisation of race hate crimes and a further conceptual separation of ‘the people’ from the political classes. Data is taken from the UKIP twitter account and I qualitatively analyse this by paying particular attention to topoi and to the discursive construction of ‘the people’ as a social actor.
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.
The concept of the German ‘people’ is central in the discourses of the new political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which emerged on the political scene in 2013. Characterised as a right-wing populist Eurosceptic party, AfD presents itself as giving voice to the German ‘people’, its concerns and fears, in counterposition to other political groupings which it describes as etabliert (established) or Altparteien (old parties). These parties, it asserts, have betrayed the German people both economically and culturally, and this has been exacerbated by their responses to recent migratory movements. In this context, it is pertinent to ask what the term ‘(German) people’ actually means for this political movement: what are its representatives referring to when they speak of the ‘(German) people’? Who are the ‘people’ whose legitimate representative AfD claims to be? What words are used to describe them, and how are they represented in their relationships to other players, such as the government, the established parties, the EU, or migrants and refugees? The present study will focus on the following sources: the bulletin AfD-Kompakt, the election manifestos, and the Twitter accounts of the party and its leader Frauke Petry. First, I analyse the lexemes used to refer to the people, taking into account their connotations in the historical context of German nationalism. Secondly, I conduct a qualitative analysis of key excerpts from these sources in which the ‘people’ are represented in their relationship with their various adversaries. Finally, I bring these ideas together to consider the AfD’s characteristic mode of representation, that is, the way in which it legitimises its claims to speak for the German people.
In recent years, a growing body of political-scientific literature has focused on the empirical measurement of populism. In such studies, “people-centrism” is one of the most frequently analysed discourse characteristics, i.e. to what extent “the people” are put in the focus of attention in a politician’s discourse. In order to measure people-centrism empirically, it is common practice to use the number of references to the electorate as the only indicator. In this contribution, however, I argue that the way in which politicians refer to “the people” should be taken into account as well. By presenting a case study from Dutch politics, in which the populist Geert Wilders plays an important role, I substantiate that analysing the syntactic position in which “the people” are presented and the strategic use of perspective or attributed viewpoint deepens our understanding of how (populist) politicians put “the people” in the centre of attention in their discourse. As such this contribution also aims to demonstrate how a linguistic approach to populism can contribute to the empirical measurement of populism.
The present chapter approaches populist discourse in Hungary through a case study of parliamentary speeches surrounding the immigration quota referendum of 2 October, 2016. The analysis uses a mixed methodology of quantitative and qualitative approaches at the intersection of corpus linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and pragmatic marker research. The aim is to identify populist discursive strategies used by government and opposition parties in the course of parliamentary debates relating to (anti-)immigration in general and the immigration quota referendum in particular. The findings suggest that most discursive strategies (e.g. polarizing, suppression, antagonizing, selective presentation) can be observed in both pro- and anti-government campaigns, but there are differences in the degree of implicitness/explicitness used and in the linguistic realizations of the strategies.
The political landscape in Europe is currently going through a phase of rapid change. New actors and movements that claim to represent 'the will of the people' are attracting considerable public attention, with dramatic consequences for election outcomes. This volume explores the new political order with a particular focus on discursive constructions of 'the people' and the category of populism across the spectrum. It shows how a unitary representation of 'the people' is a central element in a vast range of very diverse political discourses today, acting to anchor identities and project antagonisms in a multitude of settings. The chapters in this book explore commonality and contrast in representations of ‘the people’ in both radical and mainstream political movements, looking in depth at recent political discourses in the European sphere. The authors draw on approaches ranging from Essex-style discourse theory over critical discourse studies, corpus analysis and linguistic pragmatics, to investigate how historically situated categories such as the people and populism become fixed through local linguistic, textual and narrative practices as well as through wider ideological and discursive patterns.
As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
Aiming to provide some theoretical context to this edited volume on Imagining the Peoples of Europe, this chapter argues that a discourse-theoretical definition of populism as a political logic is the best basis for discursive analyses of populist politics. In identifying what makes populist politics across the political spectrum populist, the chapter strongly builds on Laclau’s work. But it more explicitly limits populism to a particular political logic that revolves around the claim to represent ‘the people’, discursively constructed through a down/up opposition between the people-as-underdog and ‘the elite’ as a small and illegitimately powerful group that is argued not to satisfy the needs and demands of the people. This definition also emphasizes how populism constructs not only ‘the people’ but also ‘the elite’, and how it presents certain demands as the will of the people. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the proposed definition’s implications for the empirical analysis of populist politics across the political spectrum, suggesting that we need to analyze the ways in which populists construct the down/up opposition between ‘people’ and ‘elite’ as well as how this opposition is articulated with other elements of populists’ particular programs and strategies.
Most works on populism framed in a discourse-analytic perspective focus on the features of populist discourse itself, contributing greatly to the understanding of the phenomenon. However, a full understanding of populism should also consider the ways in which notions of populism are constructed, negotiated, reproduced, and popularised in public discourse, as this contributes greatly to forming public opinion at large and peoples responses to populism itself. For this reason, the chapter addresses discourses about populism, with a focus on editorials dealing with Brexit in the British and Italian press. Although their position of supremacy in orienting public opinion has been partly mined by talk shows, blogs, and social media at large, opinion pieces remain one of the most important sites in which intellectuals (generally senior journalists) publicly share their views trying at the same time to influence the opinion of the readers. Based on an original framework integrating categories from critical discourse studies, argumentation theory, and the study of heteroglossia/dialogism, the analysis focuses on the ways in which editorialists define and evaluate populism and populists, the argumentative topoi they employ to support their standpoints, and whether and how they engage alternative viewpoints. In our view, all these aspects concur to expand or reduce the space of dialogue created by the text, and hence, we claim, the ability of the readers to feel included, and see their positions represented, in the broader discussion. The risk is that if no dialogue is opened at all with the people who uphold populist views, intellectual discourse will fail to involve them as interlocutors in a critical discussion, thus making them more receptive (or vulnerable) to populist propaganda.
In this chapter, we compare the discourse of Podemos and Movimento Cinque Stelle in order to answer the following question: to what extent do these movements pertain to the same political phenomenon? Based on Laclau’s definition of populism, we provide a “snapshot” of both parties’ discourse between 2012 and 2016 by carrying out a corpus-based analysis that combines lexicography and metaphor analysis. The results show that they display a populist logic and represent two counter-discourses against neoliberal hegemony. However, they also display important differences that could prove to be decisive when it comes to seizing political power and building an alternative to the hegemonic order they challenge, as their recent evolutions have shown.
This study focuses the Islamic/conservative populism of the Justice and the Development Party (AKP) in Turkey. Drawing on the post-structuralist discourse-theoretical perspective developed by Ernesto Laclau, it demonstrates how the populist discourse of the AKP substantially changed in this period through fluctuations in the boundaries that separated ‘the people’ from ‘the power’ as well as the components of both of these categories. While ‘the people’ signifier initially acted as an empty signifier that represented a series of unfulfilled social demands against ‘the power’ – the institutional system – that negated these demands, it gradually came to signify Islamic/conservative demands against all those opposing the AKP. This transformation involved a move from a relatively inclusive and democratic populism to an exclusive and authoritarian one.
This chapter focuses on the construction of pueblo ‘people’ and patria ‘homeland’ in the Spanish discourse of Podemos and the party’s relation to la gente ‘the people’ between June 2016 and its second political conference, Vistalegre II (February 2017). The discursive analysis focuses on figures of speech, such as synecdoche and metaphors, followed by a narrative analysis. The data cover the General Secretary of the party, Pablo Iglesias and the head of the branch in Catalonia, Xavier Domènech. We then apply the explanatory logics developed within discourse theory (Glynos and Howarth 2007) to interpret the results of the analysis1 and we critically reflect on some observed ambiguities in the discourse of Podemos.
In the Danish context, populism is usually associated with the radical right-wing. However, the left-wing Red-Green Alliance (the RGA), which defines itself as socialist, has carried out a populist turn coinciding with a remarkable electoral growth from 2.2% in 2007 to 7.8% in 2015. I argue that the RGA presents a hybrid form of left-wing populism in which socialist and populist articulations converge. The discourse is socialist since equality (or struggle against inequality) is the main value; the materialist approach is dominant; and there are plenty of references to class, working-class and class struggles. It is populist in the sense that inequality is portrayed as a conflict against the elite; and there is an attempt to constitute a new collective subject named “community”. Moreover, the RGA’s opposition towards the EU connects with the populist resistance to global neoliberalism and the defense of national sovereignty.
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.
Who are the people? As a semantically underspecified noun, the lexeme “people” and related terms such as “citizen(s)” or “constituent(s)” lead to various representations and are filled with competing meanings. By undertaking a cross-linguistic analysis of the semantic value of nouns denoting human referents in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, this paper investigates how the “people” (people in English, Volk in German, peuple in French) and related linguistic expressions (notably Mensch, Bürger, citoyen) are discursively staged in national parliamentary debates on Europe.
The people represent the entity Members of Parliament (MPs) speak to, about, and on behalf of. In political sciences, mentioning the people immediately raises concerns about a populist message or stance. To which extent, then, does the reference to “the people” or “a people” pertain to a populist stance?
Based on an annotated corpus of forty-four national parliamentary debates between 1998 and 2015, this paper uses mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) to assess how the “people” are referred to across the political spectrum in the British House of Commons, the German Bundestag and the French Assemblée nationale. By taking into account a large amount of speakers across different times and cultures, the analysis shows that the reference to “the people” – partly in opposition to “a people” – is a basic component of political discourse, thus indicating that the mere mention of the “people” cannot be regarded as a feature of populist rhetoric.
Right wing populism has always been exclusionary in nature and relies on classic positive in-group/negative out-group constructions (van Dijk 1998). This chapter investigates how the UK Independence Party (UKIP) discursively constructed ‘the people’ during the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum campaign. It will be argued that ‘the people’ were defined in opposition to two key groups: Elite mainstream political actors and migrants. The consequence of this strategy has been the legitimisation of race hate crimes and a further conceptual separation of ‘the people’ from the political classes. Data is taken from the UKIP twitter account and I qualitatively analyse this by paying particular attention to topoi and to the discursive construction of ‘the people’ as a social actor.
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.
The concept of the German ‘people’ is central in the discourses of the new political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which emerged on the political scene in 2013. Characterised as a right-wing populist Eurosceptic party, AfD presents itself as giving voice to the German ‘people’, its concerns and fears, in counterposition to other political groupings which it describes as etabliert (established) or Altparteien (old parties). These parties, it asserts, have betrayed the German people both economically and culturally, and this has been exacerbated by their responses to recent migratory movements. In this context, it is pertinent to ask what the term ‘(German) people’ actually means for this political movement: what are its representatives referring to when they speak of the ‘(German) people’? Who are the ‘people’ whose legitimate representative AfD claims to be? What words are used to describe them, and how are they represented in their relationships to other players, such as the government, the established parties, the EU, or migrants and refugees? The present study will focus on the following sources: the bulletin AfD-Kompakt, the election manifestos, and the Twitter accounts of the party and its leader Frauke Petry. First, I analyse the lexemes used to refer to the people, taking into account their connotations in the historical context of German nationalism. Secondly, I conduct a qualitative analysis of key excerpts from these sources in which the ‘people’ are represented in their relationship with their various adversaries. Finally, I bring these ideas together to consider the AfD’s characteristic mode of representation, that is, the way in which it legitimises its claims to speak for the German people.
In recent years, a growing body of political-scientific literature has focused on the empirical measurement of populism. In such studies, “people-centrism” is one of the most frequently analysed discourse characteristics, i.e. to what extent “the people” are put in the focus of attention in a politician’s discourse. In order to measure people-centrism empirically, it is common practice to use the number of references to the electorate as the only indicator. In this contribution, however, I argue that the way in which politicians refer to “the people” should be taken into account as well. By presenting a case study from Dutch politics, in which the populist Geert Wilders plays an important role, I substantiate that analysing the syntactic position in which “the people” are presented and the strategic use of perspective or attributed viewpoint deepens our understanding of how (populist) politicians put “the people” in the centre of attention in their discourse. As such this contribution also aims to demonstrate how a linguistic approach to populism can contribute to the empirical measurement of populism.
The present chapter approaches populist discourse in Hungary through a case study of parliamentary speeches surrounding the immigration quota referendum of 2 October, 2016. The analysis uses a mixed methodology of quantitative and qualitative approaches at the intersection of corpus linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and pragmatic marker research. The aim is to identify populist discursive strategies used by government and opposition parties in the course of parliamentary debates relating to (anti-)immigration in general and the immigration quota referendum in particular. The findings suggest that most discursive strategies (e.g. polarizing, suppression, antagonizing, selective presentation) can be observed in both pro- and anti-government campaigns, but there are differences in the degree of implicitness/explicitness used and in the linguistic realizations of the strategies.