Article published In:
Right-Wing Populism in Europe & USA: Contesting Politics & Discourse beyond ‘Orbanism’ and ‘Trumpism’Edited by Ruth Wodak and Michał Krzyżanowski
[Journal of Language and Politics 16:4] 2017
► pp. 535–550
Edited by Ruth Wodak and Michał Krzyżanowski
[Journal of Language and Politics 16:4] 2017
► pp. 535–550
Populist discourses in the Hungarian public sphere
From right to left (and Beyond)?
Extending Laclau’s (2005) claim to the importance of ‘populism’ for a democratic politics, I argue that the ‘we’, when issued from a left-wing position around ‘empty signifiers’, must be informed by an inclusionary logic. In my critical study of the Hungarian Government’s right-wing populist discourses, I show that their billboard campaign in 2016 against the European Union’s migrant quota articulates the ‘we are not like them’ exclusionary distinction of ‘against and over’. Through Judith Butler’s category of vulnerability and Mary Matsuda’s relative distinction between immediate and indirect targets of exclusion, I explore the inclusionary logic of the campaign by the Two-Tailed Dog Party. I demonstrate that a non-identitarian collective subject "from below" in their alternative left-wing populism is made possible by the power of irony that may sidestep the mobilising force of fear that should legitimise the Government’s agenda.
Keywords: right-wing populism, left-wing populism, alternative left-wing populism, Two-Tailed Dog Party, Hungarian Government, empty signifier, vulneribility, non-exclusionary identity, irony
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Beyond the exclusionary logic of ‘us’
- 3.Analysis of the ideological investments of the billboards
- 4.The alternative left-wing populism
- 5.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
References (12)
Barát, Erzsébet. 2012. “Queering the intersection of legislative, religious, and higher educational exclusion: Revisiting the First Case of collective LGBT litigation in Hungary.” In Transport of Queer Theory, ed. by Katharina M. Wiedlack, and Sushila Mesquita, 81–95. Vienna: Zaglossus.
. 1996. “Are You an Alien? Ideologies at Work in the Printed Hungarian Media.” In Framing the Issues: British Studies – Media Studies Conference Papers, ed. by John Cunningham and János Horváth, 125–48. Budapest: British Council.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life – The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso.
. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 
Chiantrea-Stutte, Patricia, and Adrea Pető. 2003. “Cultures of Populism and the Political Right in Central Europe.” Comparative Literature and Culture 5(4): 417–27.
Connell, W. Raewyn and James Messerschmidt. 2005. “Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept.” Gender and Society 19(6): 829–859.
Hutchings, Stephen, and Vera Tolz. 2015. Nation, Ethnicity and Race on Russian Television: Mediating Post-Soviet Difference. London and New York: Routledge.
Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London and New York: Verso.
. 1996. “Why do empty signifiers matter to politics?” In Emancipation(s), ed. by Ernesto Laclau, 36–46. London: Verso.
Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. 1993. Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. Colorado and Oxford: Westview Press.
Pelinka, Anton. 2013. “Right-wing populism: Concept and typology.” In Right-wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse, ed. by Ruth Wodak, Majid KhosraviNik, and Brigitte Mral, 3–22. London: Bloomsbury.
Wodak, Ruth. 2015. The Politics of Fear. What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC: Sage.
Cited by (9)
Cited by nine other publications
Hyttinen, Anniina
2024. Possibilities and limits of political humour in a hybrid regime. The European Journal of Humour Research 12:1 ► pp. 171 ff. 
Szalai, Andras
2024. Bordering and crisis narratives to illiberal ends. Journal of Language and Politics 23:3 ► pp. 391 ff.
Dobkiewicz, Patryk, Agnieszka Chmiel & Małgorzata Fabiszak
2023. Source text ideological load modulates ideological shifts in interpreting right-wing and left-wing political discourse, but interpreters’ political orientation does not. Ampersand 11 ► pp. 100151 ff.
Brusenbauch Meislova, Monika & Steve Buckledee
2021. Discursive (re)construction of populist sovereignism by right-wing hard Eurosceptic parties in the 2019 European parliament
elections. Journal of Language and Politics 20:6 ► pp. 825 ff.
Barát, Erzsébet
2020. Stigmatization of the Analytical Concept of Gender as Ideology. Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies :3 ► pp. 113 ff.
Barát, Erzsébet
2022. Paradoxes of the Right-Wing Sexual/Gender Politics in Hungary: Right-Wing Populism and the Ban of Gender Studies. In Paradoxical Right-Wing Sexual Politics in Europe [Global Queer Politics, ], ► pp. 173 ff.
Lubarda, Balsa
2020. ‘Homeland farming’ or ‘rural emancipation’? The discursive overlap between populist and green parties in Hungary. Sociologia Ruralis 60:4 ► pp. 810 ff.
Csehi, Robert
2019. Neither episodic, nor destined to failure? The endurance of Hungarian populism after 2010. Democratization 26:6 ► pp. 1011 ff.
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.