Is populist rhetoric the mainstream way of Hungarian oppositional communication?

Abstract

The thesis examines the political communication of the Hungarian opposition parties in the campaign leading up to the 2021 Hungarian opposition primaries to determine to what extent their discourse could be categorised as populist. The hypothesis of the study is that the prime minister candidates applied populist communication in their campaigns. The thesis works with Mudde’s (2004) thin-centred approach for populism, coupled with Jagers and Walgrave’s (2007) conceptualisation of populism as a political communication style. To answer the research question, the thesis analysis the prime minister candidates’ intervention in their first debate. Each intervention is checked for the two core features of the populist communication style, which are (a) people-centrism and (b) anti-elitism. To answer the research question, in the framework of the discursive conceptualisation, the thesis applies an emerging qualitative text analysis methodology looking for signs of implicit and explicit populism. The analysis confirmed the hypothesis by showing that the prime minister candidates dominantly used populist communication in their interventions. The results suggest that Hungarian political communication is more generally characterised by the populist communication style than what might be commonly assumed.