International audienceEurope and now the United States are characterized by the growing presence of populist parties and leaders able to attract a significant share of the electorate. The successful strategy of populist politicians consists in proposing a series of discourses based on a differentiation between an endangered “Us” and a threatening “Them”. The protection of the “Us” community from the evil “Them” formulated by right-wing populist politicians is often expressed through the necessity of closing the national border, this measure being a key discursive resource incorporated in their speeches. However, is the border only presented by populist leaders as a boundary which has to be controlled, securitized and sealed? Based on the analysis of discourses produced by Viktor Orbán, the only long-standing European populist leader in power, the research shows that populist discourses can be based on opposed and complementary conceptions of the state border to entrench the opposition between an “Us” and “Them”
There is one European state leader from the moderate Christian-democrat center right who has developed a discourse and policies showing his progressive move toward the radical right: Viktor Orbán. Can Christianity be considered from a Laclauian perspective, as a “nodal point” of Orbán's radical right discourse; that is, a key element around which his antagonistic narratives are structured? Based on an analysis of segments of Orbán's speeches between 2014 and 2019 that mention Christianity, the research reveals that this religion is a nodal point for three main reasons: (1) the density of Christian references used to shape a negative and antagonistic discourse, strategically adjusted to his audience; (2) the use of Christianity to ground the three ideological pillars of the radical right (populism, nativism, and authoritarianism); and (3) the mobilization of Christianity to organize a hegemonic struggle against the dominant political force that has defined the meaning of this religion in the European public sphere—the moderate center right.
Populist leaders and their radical policies attract the interest of the media across borders. The aim of the current article is to uncover whether interviews centered on one populist leader, but involving interviewers located in different European countries, lead to the same production of populist equivocation across the EU. In addition, two types of journalistic elements that can explain potential differences are investigated: the broad interactions between the media and politicians in a given country, or the reporters belonging to a specific media segment such as the tabloid press or public broadcasters. The research is based on interviews given by Viktor Orbán during the 2019 EU election campaign. Critical discourse analysis is carried out to investigate the equivocal populist narratives produced.
Radical-right populism has become a structural political phenomenon in theEuropean Union in recent years. This ideology, the core principle of which is based on a nurtured antagonism between the 'people' and the 'elite', combined with a parallel promotion of authoritarian and nativist ideas, is generally associated with the nation state and its core territorial ideology: nationalism. However, populism can also be scaled at the regional level, within or across European state borders. This article, which is based on critical discourse analysis, aims to investigate what might constitute the meaning of cross-national regionalism according to a radical-right populist leader in Europe. More precisely, my objective is to research the antagonism this type of leader can structure to organize territorial, symbolic and institutional claims associated with a specific crossnational region. This research is based on the discourse Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán produced in relation to the Visegrád region. My analysis helps to reveal the types of power geometries articulated by populist leaders beyond state borders.
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