Different tongues, different discourse? Populist radical right’s rhetoric in titular and ethnic minority language

The increasingly fragmented public sphere creates potential opportunities for diversified political communication with divergent target groups. This paper analyses, how this is utilised by the populist radical right. In multicultural societies, political parties have the option of reaching out to different target groups in different languages. While this may have possible backfire effects e.g. when the media discovers grave contradictions in the party’s rhetoric, differences in communicating with various auditoria may nevertheless occur. In this paper we test whether EKRE portrays the Russian minority in Estonia and the political issues related to the ethnic cleavage differently in Estonian-language and Russian-language media. EKRE is a populist radical right party that has historically antagonised the Russian minority from its nationalist stance but has recently made some attempts to become more appealing to this group, as the Russian minority is on average more socially conservative than the Estonian population, and could thus appreciate a large share of the party’s programme. By combining a large-N media content analysis on EKRE’s appearances in the Estonian and Russian language online media with critical discourse analysis of select news items, we will be presenting both the general trends as well as exploring the nuances and ambivalence in their discourse in detail.