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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

Populist discourses in the Hungarian public sphere

From right to left (and Beyond)?

| University of Szeged

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
Published online: 12 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17026.bar
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