Between Mitigation and Dramatization: The Effect of the COVID-19 Crisis on Populists’ Discourses and Strategies

Populist radical right parties and discursive opportunities during Covid-19. Blame attribution in times of crisis

“…The outbreak of Covid-19 and respective media coverage increases insecurity within societies and thereby shift the focus on existential issues and healthcare policy (Garfin et al 2020) that have little to do with right-wing populists' nativist discourses. According to Bobba and Hubé (2020b), the crisis has affected every aspect of private and public life reducing opportunities for populist and nationalist rhetoric. Especially if we consider nativist messages as crucial feature (Akkerman 2017;Rydgren 2017) and hence, indispensable for PRRP, discursive opportunities are severely restricted by the pandemic.…”

“…In this regard, the Corona pandemic can be considered as an “event” that highlights issues outside of the usual political domains political competition usually takes place, at least until summer 2020 (Bobba and Hubé 2020 b). Besides “rally-’round-the-flag” effects where people unify in the face of common threats behind the executive (Murray 2017 )—reflected for example in the increased vote share for German and Austrian center-right governing parties during the first months of the pandemic and temporary vote losses for Spanish, German and Austrian PRRP 3 —populist parties found it hard to make use of their classical tactics.…”

“…Certain ethnic minorities or immigrant communities have indeed been attacked for putting the country’s public health at risk by spreading the virus. For example, Chinese people have been accused of spreading the virus, as well as immigrants and occasionally the Roma population (Baião 2020 ; Bobba and Hubé 2020 b; Wondreys and Mudde 2020 ). Hence, in the context of the pandemic, immigrants can primarily be blamed for spreading the virus and for not following the recommendations and rules to decrease the spread.…”

“…In general, critical events such as the so-called “refugee crisis” or the European financial crisis offer discursive opportunities for PRRP (Caiani and Graziano 2019 ) since populist and nativist messages can be easily applied to situations where elites and cultural, national or religious groups are in the focus of debates. Yet, the current Covid-19 pandemic delivers very exceptional and challenging discursive opportunities for PRRP (Bobba and Hubé 2020 b). While the amount of scholarship about PRRP’s behavior during the pandemic recently increased considerably, we still lack systematic empirical and comparative knowledge about targets and content of PRRP’s blame attribution since the outbreak of the virus in Europe.…”

COVID-19: A Political Virus? VOX’s Populist Discourse in Times of Crisis

“…The efforts to curb this pandemic using social confinement measures reduced civil liberties, eroded social capital and brought about economic insecurity (Fetzer et al, 2020). Although there are already several studies exploring the political consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Bol et al, 2020;Santana et al, 2020;Bobba and Hubé, 2021;Jungkuntz, 2021), the analysis of the impact of this crisis on the discourse of populist parties and leaders is still in its infancy. 1 This article tries to shed some light on the interaction between populism and crisis by applying a content analysis methodology (Bauer, 2000) to the parliamentary speeches of Santiago Abascal, the leader of the Spanish populist radical right party VOX (Turnbull Dugarte et al, 2020;Rama et al, 2021), during the first wave of the pandemic.…”