Populist representation through the portrayal of food

Contemporary populism is a highly debated subject of political science. However, there are different lines of thought within populism research itself. Although some people seek its essence in political programs or policies, others argue that its core can be found in the dimension of communication or discourse. What politicians talk about, and how they talk about it, has a transformative power, and can change our shared political reality. As realist democratic theory has pointed out, the average citizen does not typically spend his time with reading political programs. In our contemporary era, political communication has been blended with infotainment more than ever, and political influence can be found in quite unusual places. Just recently it became observable in politics how the portrayal of food gets more and more significance in populist communication: let’s just think about the most prominent one, Donald Trump and his hamburgers. In Hungarian politics, food became a vessel through which politicians emphasize their nationalist feelings, their traditionalist views and their masculinity. Communication about food is more prevalent than ever, both in the social and the traditional media and traditional media outlets. This paper seeks to analyze how the portrayal of food appears in populist political communication and reflect on what relevance it has with regards to our shared imaginary, and how that differs regionally, or from country to country. As the connection between food and populist communication is an existing gap in the literature the paper intends to lay down the theoretical foundations of this unusual relation. To illustrative the theory, examples will be presented from Hungarian politics, as a case study analysis will be conducted of the communication of the governing party, FIDESZ. The results will be contrasted with the communication of some international populist actors, in order to tackle regional peculiarities and to examine if there are some aspects of populist food portrayal that can be generalized. The research will be conducted through critical discourse analysis, aided by visual content analysis. Empirical data will be drafted both from social and traditional media outlets. The primary aim of the research is to fill a currently existing gap in the literature by bridging contemporary populism and the representation of food in political communication, paying special attention to the possible regional peculiarities that exist in the ECE region.