Purifying politics: guilt arousing language in the prime ministerial candidate’s rhetoric during the 2022 general election campaign in Hungary

The study illustrates the benefits and know-how of the moral emotion-centered approach to political communication in campaign context. In Hungary, on the 3rd of April 2022 Parliamentary elections were held to elect the National Assembly which is an unicameral parliament consists of a directly elected MPs with the power to determine the executive government. The leaders of the parties are usually considered as prime ministerial candidates. The election of 2022 had been predicted to be closer than in previous years, because the most popular left-leaning, liberal, green, conservative and progressive parties decided on running together and solidifying their electoral alliance with one prime ministerial candidate to defeat the dominant Fidesz party. Literature suggests that, to beat the incumbent candidate, challengers often introduce political purification as their goal: the strategy of claiming, defending, and laundering the original ideology of their reference party or the whole party competition (Glover 1970). To do so, purifiers should emphasize that the established political elite deviates from their original mission, ideology, or social values (Lucardie, 2000) and assign blames to political rivals in a partisan manner (Jamieson, 1996; Hansson, 2022). This paper discovers the use of guilt arousing communication in the challenger’s rhetoric during the election campaign. Based on the social media messages of the united opposition’s prime ministerial candidate, the paper registers and analyzes the emotion-based blaming which is a strategy to convince voters that the “morally wrong” and “corrupted” Hungarian politics needs to be “laundered” and “cleaned up”. With various forms of guilting, the opposition’s prime ministerial candidate portrayed himself as a moral purifier of the political life. By presenting and discussing the results of the qualitative content analysis of the challenger’s guilt elicitations during the election campaigning, the paper shows the nuanced description of emotionally loaded blame assignment and attribution. References Glover, Jonathan. 1970. Responsibility. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lucardie, P. (2000). Prophets, Purifiers and Prolocutors: Towards a Theory on the Emergence of New Parties. Party Politics, 6(2), 175–185. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068800006002003 Jamieson, K. H. (1996). Packaging the presidency: A history and criticism of presidential campaign advertising. (3rd ed.) New York: Oxford University Press. Hansson, S., Page, R., & Fuoli, M. (2022). Discursive Strategies of Blaming: The Language of Judgment and Political Protest Online. Social Media + Society, 8(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221138753