The Concept of Rights and Liberties in the Political Discourse of the Populist Radical Right: Propaganda on YouTube in the European Elections Campaigns

The work uncovers strategies of the use of the concept of rights and liberties proposed to the voter by the populist radical right in the run-up to the 2019 EU parliamentary elections. It strives to highlight discursive mechanisms employed to construct this concept and clarifies what the PRR means when it uses the words rights and liberties in the present EU context. The research studies the cases of two PRR parties with very dissimilar backgrounds – the Polish Prawo i Sprawiedliwość and the French Rassemblement National – trying to distinguish a set of techniques that they use when manipulating the concept of rights in the electoral context. Both parties are considered to be PRR as their political discourses are saturated with elements of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. The work deals with the PRR political discourses focusing on verbal and visual texts uploaded on the official YouTube channels of the two parties in the course for their 2019 European elections campaigns. Such discourse is a priori ideologically loaded and serves to construct interpretations of concepts that politicians strive to impose on the voter. The analysis of verbal texts combines elements of the morphological analysis of ideology (Freeden 1994) with methods and tools of the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl and Wodak 2016) and the discourse-conceptual approach (Krzyżanowski 2016) to critical discourse analysis to reconstruct the content of concepts and place them in their respective semantic fields. Visual texts are explored using the techniques of the multimodal approach to critical discourse analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006).