This article illuminates the far-right populist Alternative for Germany's (AfD) performances of delegitmisation vis-à-vis EUrope and
legitmisation of itself/the nation by articulating two paradigmatic, transnational crises: climate change and COVID-19. It asks: ‘how
does the far-right AfD perform these two crises to legitimise itself and delegitimize others?’ and ‘what similarities/differences
exist between the performance of these two crises in terms of topics, narrative (genres) and their linguistic realisations?’. To
explore AfD’s de/legitimisation efforts, written texts and videos by AfD representatives through which they intervene in
discourses about climate change in 2019 and COVID-19 in 2020 are analysed. The analysis identifies a two-dimensional process of
narrative delegitimization, vilifying national and backgrounding EUropean ‘others’, and illustrates that a
comic-romantic emplotment of ethno-national rebirth pre-configures the largely same topics and topoi. In so
doing, the article, furthermore, takes another step towards the conceptual integration of narrative (genre) into the
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2024. A Theory of Populist Far-Right Issue Entrepreneurship in an Age of Dealignment. In Political Entrepreneurship in the Age of Dealignment [New Perspectives in German Political Studies, ], ► pp. 33 ff.
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2023. The Narrative Foundations of Radical and Deradicalizing Online Discursive Spaces: A Comparison of the Cases of Generation Islam and Jamal al-Khatib in Germany. Religions 14:2 ► pp. 167 ff.
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