The blurry boundaries of "the people" as "the victims": the populist radical right’s framing of Jews and antisemitism

The antagonistic relationship between "the people" and "the elite" is a feature of populism which remains largely consistent across its different conceptualisations (e.g., Taggart, 2000; Mudde; 2007; Moffitt, 2016). Considering the Western European populist radical right’s increasing refutation of antisemitism, the central research question of this paper is, are Jews now treated as a part of "the people"? This paper examines Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) posts by the Alternative für Deutschland (Germany) and Freheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) using a combination of discourse-historical analysis (Wodak & Reisigl, 2001) and analysis of populist style (Ernst et al, 2019). It investigates how the parties construct "the people" as "the victims" of various crises on Facebook and X and, in line with this, finds that Jews are accepted into "the people" as long as their victimhood serves to legitimise and bolster a wider national collective victimhood. For example, the parties include Jews in narratives of shared "victimisation" by Islam, immigrants, the government, and left-wing actors. However, as the roles of victim and perpetrator are often considered to be mutually exclusive (Shnabel, 2013), the inclusion of Jews into "the people" is more insecure when it threatens, or is perceived to cause, non-Jewish German and Austrian victimhood. This is demonstrated through two principal thematic streams. Firstly, the parties focus on non-Jewish German and Austrian historical victimhood in WWII and minimise Holocaust remembrance. Secondly, they use antisemitic tropes to criticise Israeli politicians and Hungarian-born American investor George Soros, who was born to Jewish parents, to frame these actors as part of "the elite" who cause the victimisation of "the people."