Rearranging the premises of democratic legitimacy: discursive tools to market the idea of exclusive representation in the populist rhetoric of Viktor Orbán

Abstract

This article studies discursive strategies to construct persuasive views about the political setting in right-wing populism by Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán. We analyse his public speeches with the tools of epistemic governance and membership categorization analysis (MCA). Our research explains a set of rhetorical tools to re-arrange the constellations of political actors, which are consequential to inferences about political legitimacy, national authenticity and a sense of external threat. We aim to show how the moral casting of actors is constructed across political scenes and how bi-polarized ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomies are played out in the portrayals of political scenes.