“Wir Sind Das Volk!” – Examining the Processes of Representative Claim-Making in Pegida’s Populist Discourse and Performance

The proposed paper examines the mobilization of identity in transnational counter-cultures and counter-politics against the backdrop of European integration. As a starting point, it observes the upsurge of incidences of populist challenges to liberal democratic systems in multiple Western societies during the past years. Expressing a lack of identification with allegedly unrepresentative political systems, populists from all over Europe to the United States of America appeal to ‘the people’ and question the legitimacy of the (perceived) political elites. In contemporary Europe, one of the most striking and enigmatic examples of populist counter-politics are the Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West; acronym: Pegida). In order to mobilize a counter-identity amongst its (possible) supporters, the group claims to be the true representative of ‘the people’ (“Wir sind das Volk!”), and utters harsh criticism of the German and European political establishment. In particular, the paper explores the processes of representative claim-making by the German populist social movement Pegida. Asking how Pegida discursively constructs itself as representative of ‘the people,’ the study builds a conceptual framework that discusses and integrates three strands of thought: Moffitt’s notion of populism as political style, Tilly and Tarrow’s approach to social movements as claim-makers, as well as Saward’s theory of political representation as discursive construction and performance. Using a varied set of online primary sources such as texts, images, photos and videos posted on social media and activists’ webpages, as well as newspaper articles, the study conducts a contextualized analysis of Pegida’s discourse and action. The analysis identifies the main performative, linguistic and aesthetic strategies that Pegida employs to construct the movement as the legitimate representative of the German and European peoples. Firstly, Pegida constructs itself as the true and only bearer of German and European history, cultural heritage, and identity. Secondly, Pegida appeals to economically disadvantaged minorities that allegedly lack political representation and therefore lose political identification with the current state of liberal democracy. Prominent tenets in this claim-making process are the appeal to not only local/regional, but also national/transnational identities, the techniques of Othering as a tool to create exclusive, nativist identities, as well as the use of an ambiguous and ambivalent set of ideological references of modern politics. This paper ties in with a number of theoretical and methodological debates in studying contemporary forms of identity politics and challenges to liberal democracy in general. It draws on a number of seemingly remote theoretical strands of thought in the fields of populism, social movements, sociolinguistics and political representation and applies a critical, qualitative approach to a wide variety of (digital) primary source material. Moreover, this studies adds to our understanding of contemporary forms of social and political mobilization against the backdrop of increasing social cleavages and discontent in Western Europe.