“Defend Your Right!” How the Populist Radical Right Uses References to Rights and Freedoms to Discursively Construct Identities

New Perspectives. 2021.

Алексеев А. В.

The article explores the place of the concept of rights and freedoms in the discourse of the European populist radical right. By applying instruments of critical discourse analysis to electoral speeches of Marine Le Pen and Jarosław Kaczyński, the leaders of two very dissimilar EU PRR parties, the Rassemblement National and the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, it demonstrates how the PRR instrumentalises references to rights and freedoms to discursively create and qualify the identities of social actors. The analysis shows that references to rights and freedoms are used as a coherent discursive strategy to construct social actors in accordance with the populist radical right ideological core of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. As the PRR identifies itself with the people, defined along nativist and populist lines, rights are primarily attributed to it. The PRR itself is represented as the defender of the people and its rights, while the elites and the aliens are predicated to threaten the people and the realisation of its rights. The concept of rights and freedoms in populist radical right discourse intrinsically links the individual with the collective, which, in its turn, allows to construct and promote a populist model of ethnic democracy.

Ключевые слова: populism, human rights and freedoms, academic discourse, populist radical right, radical right