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Article published In:
Public Debates on Immigration
Edited by Andreas Musolff
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 5:2] 2017
► pp. 251–273

“We mustn’t fool ourselves”

‘Orbánian’ discourse in the political battle over the refugee crisis and European identity

 | North Carolina State University, USA
 | North Carolina State University, USA
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.
Keywords: right-wing populism, immigration discourse, discourse of fear, refugee crisis, Orbán, European identity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Brief overview of political context and refugee crisis
  • 3.Literature review
    • 3.1Immigration discourses
    • 3.2Discourses of right-wing populism
  • 4.Theoretical framework
  • 5.Methodology
  • 6.Qualitative results on discourses of fear
    • 6.1Law and order
    • 6.2Cultural and religious othering
  • 7.Political identity discourses
    • 7.1Self-representation of RWP political identity: Appeal to the people
    • 7.2Political other-representation of the EU and ‘liberals’
  • 8.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.5.2.05bol
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