What is the nature of the linguistic and discursive repertoires of contemporary right-wing mobilizations in Europe? In this episode of Democracy in Question, presenter Shalini Randeria continues the conversation about the rise of radical right-wing political movements in recent years across the world with Ruth Wodak, Emeritus Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University, and visiting professor at CEU. Together they explore the role of language and public discourse in the scheme of things, asking how this increasingly vitiated public discourse promotes the cause of a politics based on fear.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean by Ruth Wodak (2015)
Methods of Critical Discourse Studies by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (2015)
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics by Ruth Wodak and Bernhard Forchtner (2017)
Österreichische Identitäten im Wandel:Empirische Untersuchungen zu ihrer diskursiven Konstruktion1995-2015 (German Edition) by Rudolf de Cillia, Ruth Wodak, Markus Rheindorf and Sabine Lehner (2020)
The Politics of Fear: The shameless normalization of far-right populist discourses (Second Edition) by Ruth Wodak (2020)
GLOSSARY
What is “Right-wing Populist Perpetuum Mobile”?
(00:3:56 or p.1 in the transcript)
Theory that refers to the strong interdependence between media and parties, where media (and politicians) fall into the traps set by right-wing parties in the form of discursive strategies of provocation, exaggeration and scandalization, helping these parties to frame the agenda and appear on the front page in the news. Source
Who was Jörg Haider?
(00:4:02 or p.1 in the transcript)
Controversial Austrian politician, a charismatic and a skillful orator, who served as leader of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (1986–2000) and Alliance for the Future of Austria (2005–08) and as governor of the Bundesland (Federal State) of Kärnten (1989–91; 1999–2008).Haider virulently denounced immigration and opposed the expansion of the European Union to the east—positions that were applauded by a wide spectrum of Austrians. Particularly controversial were the number of statements he made about Hitler and the Nazis. Source
What is Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreich or FPÖ)?
(00:4:11 or p.1 in the transcript)
The populist Freedom Party of Austria, sometimes referred to as the Liberal Party, was founded in 1955 as a successor to the League of Independents. Initially drawing the bulk of its support from former National Socialists, the party’s fiercely right-wing views had been largely moderated by the 1980s, and it participated in a coalition government with the SPÖ. In the late 1980s that ideological swing was reversed party leader Jörg Haider, who brought the FPÖ unprecedented electoral success with a Euroskeptic platform that capitalized on anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment. An internecine feud in 2005 caused Haider to leave the FPÖ and form a new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria (Bündnis Zukunft Österreich; BZÖ). While the FPÖ remained a significant, if controversial, force in national politics in the 21st century, electoral support for the BZÖ declined greatly after Haider’s death in 2008. Source
What is Fridays for Future?
(00:24:30 or p.4 in the transcript)
Fridays for Future (or FFF) is a youth-led and -organized, independent global climate strike movement that started in August 2018, when 15-year-old Greta Thunberg began a school strike for climate, sitting outside the Swedish Parliament every school day, demanding urgent action on the climate crisis. The goal of the movement is to put moral pressure on policymakers, to make them listen to the scientists and take actions to limit global warming. Source
SR: Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores challenges democracies are facing around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, the new Rector and President of the Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. In this episode, I'm joined by Ruth Wodak, Emeritus Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University, and also a visiting professor at the CEU. Her book "Identitäten im Wandel", "Identities in transformation," was published in 2020 along with the second revised extended edition of her monograph "The Politics of Fear" with the subtitle "The Shameless Normalization of Far-Right Populist Discourses." It's wonderful to have you with me here this evening, Ruth.
RW: Thank you very much for inviting me.
SR: So in this episode, we continue our conversation about the rise of radical right-wing political movements in recent years across the world. We focus particularly on one specific issue, namely the role of language and of public discourse in the success that right-wing political movements have had of late. What is the nature of the linguistic and discursive repertoires of the contemporary right-wing mobilizations across Europe? How have its limits and boundaries changed to make certain discourses acceptable, which were once taboo? And how does this increasingly vitiated public discourse help fuel, in turn, a politics of fear, resentment, and hatred? These are some of the questions I would like to explore with Ruth Wodak.
Let me begin, Ruth, with my very first question, which is that there has been a shift in the boundaries of acceptable public discourse. What was once really a taboo can now be expressed openly. It has, as you yourself point out, been normalized. And yet, this is not a mere accident, or somehow a natural development of political discourse. It's rather the result, as you point out, of a set of deliberate and carefully crafted strategies, especially by right-wing populist politicians, who are extremely savvy at using media, especially social media. And you have a telling phrase in the book, which I would like you to elucidate in this context, and you say, the dynamics of this new phenomenon can be captured by what you call “the right-wing populist perpetuum mobile”.
RW: Just to give a bit of context to this concept which I developed, because it's important to understand that discourse is always form and content. So, many of the strategies which we probably will be talking about today also can be found in the communication and discourse of other politicians. However, it is very important to understand that the contents are realized in a specific way, and that, of course, the radical right or far-right or ethno-nationalists, or however you want to call them, have a very specific agenda. So, I firmly believe and claim that we're dealing not with just performance, but also with fragmented ideologies. They have a very clear agenda.
Now, you asked me about the radical right or far-right perpetuum mobile. And this is one of the important strategies which we already encountered with Jörg Haider, one of the first charismatic politicians of this kind, who actually won, with his party, the Austrian Freedom Party in 1999, 27% at the national election. That means almost a third of the voters. And one of the important strategies was to constantly keep the media working here to get their attention. And that works very well if you provoke and scandalize. So, if you immediately say something which breaches a taboo or you attack somebody, all the media turn to you, and they immediately start writing in headlines, page one. It is already Haider who started that. He said some terrible stuff about former SS so-called comrades being very good men, or he had another very famous scandalous appearance where he said the employment policies of the Third Reich, the Nazi Reich, were better than the employment policies of the Second Republic, and so forth and so on.
And he, of course, strategically positioned these utterances because then they kept the media busy, and everybody was interviewed about this utterance and everybody said something about it, and the Freedom Party or the speaker was then attacked. And immediately that led to them claiming that they were a victim of a campaign. And getting into this victim status is very important. So then, they said, "Okay, we are being attacked where there is a campaign." Well, who can be behind the campaign? The opposition parties, the left, the Jews, of course, because that is an old pattern, especially in Austria, but not only in Austria. So, a big conspiracy theory was constructed, and of course the media always reacted and that kept flowing.
And finally, usually, then somebody found another utterance, or a video, or something, which substantiated the first attack. And that meant the Haider, or whoever from the Freedom Party, or other far-right populists, had to apologize or say, "I'm sorry," at least in some kind of formal way, and the next scandal erupted. And you can see the shift now from one stage to the next, let's say from the Haider stage, and Berlusconi stage, they both still apologized, even if they didn't mean it.
Now, they don't apologize. Nobody apologizes. And that's what also brought me to write the second edition because there was, and is, a discursive shift. I also call it, "Anything goes" here, because it just doesn't matter. Lying mattered. Lying doesn't matter anymore. One of the functions of this perpetuum mobile is to distract, and I think this is very important and we saw this, of course, with Trump. He constantly scandalized, very strategically, be it in a sexist way, in a racist way, whatever. But at the same time, policies were implemented, and nobody talked about these policies. Everybody talked about the scandals. And in that way, this perpetuum mobile, first of all, keeps the media busy. The headlines are always about the far-right and not about other agenda. Everybody else reacts, and it is a distraction.
SR: A lot of this is a very hyper masculinist kind of political discourse. So, is there something gender-specific to the kinds of rhetoric that we are hearing here?
RW: On the one hand, we have very clear anti-genderism. That means anti-feminist politics, and we have a gender politics which wants to go back to very traditional gender roles, gender stereotypes. On the other hand, it's very interesting that many women voted for Trump. It really is the case, if you look at surveys and various interviews, etc., that racism and xenophobia are more important than sexism. So, for the women who voted for Trump, in spite of the terrible things he said about women, they were more concerned and afraid of Mexican migrants, refugees coming and, all the stereotypes, taking the jobs away and being criminalized and so forth, than the sexual insults and abuse. And the toxic masculinity and this hypermasculinity goes well with the construction of being a savior.
Now the construction of being a savior is part and parcel of this far-right, populist discourse and agenda, because they first create fear, and there might be a crisis or they create the crisis, and then they say, "I'll save you. I'm the one who will save you. I will make America great again." Or "Austria first," Haider's slogan already in 1992. We had a referendum in Austria called “Austria First”. So that's all not new. And this construction of the savior of the people, where “the people” are an arbitrarily defined group, supposedly, allegedly, homogeneous, real Austrians or Hungarians or Indians or whoever, and this party, and the representative of this party, Trump or Haider or Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage or Duterte or Bolsonaro, they will save. They will save from invasions. So, the construction of the savior is very important, added to this charisma and to the demagogy.
SR: Is there then a historical continuity? We've seen in the 1930s also in Europe these kinds of discourses of a savior, not from migrants, but from parts of one's own population who were then suddenly turned into “the other” in so many places in Europe, antisemitic discourses, which, "We're going to save the ethno-nationalist defined nation of pure Aryans or Germans or Italians, from these foreigners in their midst."
RW: Well, of course, there is continuity, and you also find it in the discourse. You find intertextual references. These parties draw on the past, and they have a revisionist narrative of the past. They reconstruct history, which we see in Poland currently, and in Hungary very strongly, but also, Vox in Spain would like to do that and go back to Francoism. And we saw that in Charlottesville in the U.S. So, this is really a very important element, this retrotopia, but it's not just nationalism. It's nativism, or ethno-nationalism, because you have to be a real Austrian or a real Hungarian and that means your grandparents... And so, it's basically going back to the blood and soil ideology.
And of course, there are references. If you look at "Mein Kampf," Hitler's basic, "important book," you already see this image constructed of the savior. And so, Hitler constructed himself as the savior of the German, the real German, Aryan Volk. And, of course, the scapegoating is another strategy where we have examples over centuries. It's not only the 20th century, where Jews and Roma and homosexuals and also physically challenged people were scapegoated and exterminated, but you see the scapegoating, specifically against Jews already from the Middle Ages, and sort of accusing a certain minority group of being to be blamed for very complex social problems, which they have nothing to do with. But it's very simple to accuse such a minority, and then to say, "Well, when those people are gone, however, whatever we do with them, then the problem goes away."
And now we see that all these far-right populists use this pattern, which has been developed over the centuries and has targeted different minorities, mostly we know in the 20th century, and build on very clear narratives which are similar to these previous narratives, so we can really establish intertextual references. And now we have the scapegoats who are mainly Muslims, also Muslim women, and young Muslim refugees, or so-called illegal migrants, but also in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia, it's still the Roma. In Poland, it's still the Jews. And there is an interesting mix of antisemitic and anti-Muslim images. [So, for example, George Soros, the founder of CEU has become really an enemy image for those radical right parties, and he is depicted in many terrible caricatures, and also in utterances, as bringing in the Muslim refugees to Europe. So, he's to blame for bringing in the Muslims who are a danger to Europe. And so, you have a mixture of antisemitic and anti-Muslim sentiments.
SR: Let's go back to one point on gender because I think it maybe illustrates another dimension of these discourses, and that is if you look at their gendered rhetoric, it also tries to incorporate apparently progressive ideas and even policy positions, right? So, if you look at some of the right-wing discourses, they are trying to claim feminist values and positions for themselves by saying that women should have the freedom to choose, but then they should have the freedom to choose motherhood, that empowerment is about empowering traditional families. So, in a sense, they seem to be getting back at women's empowerment and liberal discourses on gender using some of that same vocabulary. Is that one of the reasons why they have been successful, because it's camouflaged a little bit what the agenda on gender is?
RW: There is a very interesting attempt to colonize some of the liberal frames at least, not really the discourse, and at the same time, to attack political correctness and try to forbid abortion, and so forth. So, on the one hand, there is a use of some of this vocabulary, like "freedom for women," which is basically targeted against Muslim women and this whole debate about the headscarf, and, on the other hand, they do want women to stay at home. And we analyzed, for example, the Austrian Freedom Party's manifesto, which has a big section on gender. And what you find there is really going back to patriarchy in the biggest sense of the word. So, women should stay home. They should cook. They should have many children. Orbán has basically now put out a law that Hungarian women should have Hungarian children to be able to avoid so-called replacement. That Hungarian Volk might die out. And the Freedom Party actually spells it out. They are against that woman work, and that in 2012. So, political correctness in a very exaggerated way and with many strawman arguments is being blamed to destroy the organization of gender and social order.
SR: You've outlined so many of the strategies which the far-right has had, linguistic strategies, discursive strategies, narrative strategies, rhetorical strategies. What kind of liberal strategies do we need in order to counter these?
RW: That's a very good question, and of course, I've thought about it a lot. And there's no real recipe. There's no checklist, but there are a few things which I believe are very important. We talked about the far-right perpetuum mobile. Well, the media don't actually have to react in that way. They could, for example, put this scandal or provocation on page 10 instead of the headline on page 1, and they could also frame it differently. They could comment on it and say, "Again, we have a provocation. But, the much more important agenda now is x, y, z." So, it depends very much on how you react and do you actually use those strategies which are performed by those politicians in an active way. And you can go to a meta-level and comment. And there are moderators who do that and say, "Well, you don't want to answer this question. We have noticed that. So, let's go on."
Now, repetition is a very important strategy. Because if you repeat things all the time, the same slogan, it disseminates, and people react to it and pick it up. So, what you have to do is you don't repeat it. So, I think there are certain activities and behaviors in the media which are possible. Now we know that scandals sell, so it's, of course, also an economic problem, but it is certainly possible to frame and comment in different ways. Second thing, some parties try to, as I call it, rival the right faster than the radical right. People still did not vote for them because they went to the real people and party, not those copying it. But also conservative parties can basically colonize and swallow the far right, and we're seeing this now in the UK, where UKIP, or the Brexit party, has basically vanished because their targets were fulfilled and the Tories have taken it and built on it. Or Austria is a similar example. The really, very restrictive migration and asylum policies have become part and parcel of a Green-Turquoise Coalition, where the Green Party basically serves as a fig leaf for radical right policies.
So, there you have to really position yourself very clearly. And there's one example which shows how it works, which is almost like an experiment. In Belgium, we have a Wallonian and a Flemish radical right populist party. We also have a Flemish and a Wallonian social democratic party. Now, the elections, regional elections, in the Flemish part, the radical right won, and the social democrats lost. Why? Because they tried to drive on the right. In Wallonia, the social democratic party won. Why? because they had a coalition with the media not to report constantly on the far-right provocations and they went back to the real liberal left agenda. They didn't talk about illegal migrants. They went back to inequality, solidarity, whatever, and they won.
So, it's basically like an experiment. You asked what can one do? One needs an alternative agenda. One has to really adapt to the communication modes of the 21st century, and one has to have a different kind of media policy because the far right, as you already said at the very beginning, are very clever and have always been the first to occupy the social media. And it's important to have good presence also on social media. And you should know that you will never persuade a certain percentage of the electorate. So, what you want to do is try and address those people who don't know and who are uncertain where they will go, and you have to offer something to them.
SR: Thinking in terms of our present context, which is the COVID pandemic. The few counterexamples in the last one and a half years would be the mobilization around Black Lives Matter or the mobilization around Fridays For Future. So how do you see this kind of counter-strategy, which is a global strategy, in fact, which is able to shift political agendas away from the far right, even under the pandemic?
RW: Well, I think this is very important to study very closely, because on the one hand, we have these new social movements from below, and they are fantastic and global, but they will only probably and predictively be successful if political parties take up their agenda and implement it into policies. We'll see. We hope that Black Lives Matter will have an impact on anti-racist agenda. There are lectures now for police officers, etc. But it will only be really successful if less black young men get shot, and I think we have to be aware of that. So, this is one point.
What's the far right did during the pandemic is, I find, very interesting for a close analysis. If those parties were in opposition, they lost because in crisis, and in such crisis, the government wins first. But now in the second stage, in the second year of the crisis, the far-right has found a new strategy. And actually, it's not a new strategy. They went back to their old strategy, which is against the elites. So, they oppose the measures of the elites, which is the government, which are the measures to cope with COVID. And in that wave now, we have a launching of conspiracy theories and the anti-vaccination groups and this and that, which are all part and parcel of this new far-right protest against the government. And they are quite successful, one must say. They are quite successful in Austria and Germany, in France, in India. So, we see that they have found a niche to actually reinvent their traditional strategies.
SR: Thank you very much for this wide-ranging number of insights into how political discourse has shifted to the right and what kinds of elements make up its strategic success.
RW: Thank you.
SR: So, let me quickly summarize some of what we've learned. Some of the strategies, which the right-wing political parties have successfully used to mobilize public sentiment, have included provocations, scandalizations, in order to gain constant media attention, and of course, to distract attention from more important policy issues. Another strategy is the claim to being victims, victims of attacks by opposition parties, victims of campaigns on conspiracy theories. The mix of scapegoating of minorities and anti-elitism is also compounded by the repetition of disinformation and of untruths, which is another important strategy that needs to be countered. There is a historical continuity of discourses, of nativism, the blood and soil idea, ethno-nationalist ideas of who constitutes the real political community, which all draw on the past, a Nazi past we know well from the 1930s in Europe. In addition, many liberal frames have been colonized by these right-wing populists in order to attack liberal values and principles.
What can we do about it? Combating right-wing discursive strategies is something that the media could take care of by simply not rising to their bait, by reacting differently, by not giving them front-page coverage, by commenting critically and framing their discourses in a different way. Politically, two strategies may be in order. Political parties may just simply choose to ignore these discourses and to develop alternative agendas. But one effective strategy could be for political parties not to drive faster on the right to overturn right-wing populism.
This concludes the second episode of season three. Thank you very much for listening. My guest next will be Avrum Burg with whom I will discuss the challenges that Israeli democracy is faced with today. You can go back and listen to any episode you may have missed. And of course, let your friends know about this podcast if you've enjoyed it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu, and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.