Journal of Language and Politics - Online First

While much research has been done regarding right-wing discourse in modern Europe, the literature of Polish far-right discourse is still insufficient. The present paper discusses the discursive strategies of Grzegorz Braun, one of the leaders of Confederation Liberty and Independence, which were implemented by the politician during the 2019 Gdańsk mayoral campaign. In order to provide a comprehensive analysis of Braun’s discourse, audiovisual materials were included in the study. The findings show that Braun employs positive presentation of the Catholic Church and himself, and negative presentation of his opponents (LGBT activists, immigrants, the European Union, the elites), whom Braun considers to be in an alliance against Poland and its core values under the name of the “Gdańsk Pact”.

Focusing on the anti-extradition bill protests in Hong Kong, this article presents an analysis of Twitter posts adopting the hashtags #antiELAB, #NoChinaExtradition and #HongKongProtests. The analysis explores the public narrative among the collective identity of Hongkongers opposing the extradition bill as events unfolded during mid-2019 in Hong Kong. To do so, we adopt Bhatia’s (2015) multi-perspective framework for the Discourse of Illusion, which takes a three-prong approach to the study of argument construction and establishing legitimacy. Specifically, through the interrelated components of (1) historicity, (2) linguistic and semiotic action, and (3) social impact, the dimensions of the hashtag narrative that emerged on Twitter were explored.

This article explores how the concept of democracy is constructed, conveyed, and instrumentalised in the discourses of the populist radical right in the current EU context. The comparative analysis of the speeches of the leaders of two dissimilar PRR parties in government (Polish Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) and in opposition (French Rassemblement National) in the run-up to the 2019 European elections using tools of the discourse-historical and discourse-conceptual approaches to CDS highlights the common core of PRR interpretations of democracy, influenced by the shared axiological, institutional, and discursive framework of the EU. It shows that in the EU the PRR constructs the concept of democracy as an ideological complex, by diluting its essentially populist interpretation of democracy with liberal democratic elements. Only by advancing nativist and authoritarian interpretations of the people, does the PRR bring the concept of democracy in line with its ideological core of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism.

Since Hong Kong’s handover to China, British newspapers still play an active role in constructing Britain’s connections with its former colony. This study elaborates a schema for protests to help better understand protests in general. Based on this schema, the study examined representations of the 2019–20 protests in British newspapers using the approach of corpus-assisted critical discourse studies. The analysis shows that they mainly used the predicational strategy, and emphasized the Chinese government’s control of Hong Kong – including the inabilities of the Hong Kong government and police violence – in contrast with the protestors’ demands for universal suffrage. They suggested that Britain act as a mediator to shoulder a moral responsibility over Hong Kong. Their attitudes are interpreted with regard to Britain’s foreign policies and the dominant ideology cultivated in its historical, socio-political contexts and suggest that the UK journalistic practice regarding Hong Kong issues is political-driven to a great extent.

Protests and social movements have become part of Hong Kong’s local politics since the 1970s. However, protests against the proposed extradition bill in 2019‒20 turned out to be the most violent political mass movement in Hong Kong after its return to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. It not only drew wide international attention but also evoked another round of “news war” over Hong Kong ( Lee et al. 2002 ). This special issue collects six articles which address the representations of the protests in Hong Kong by different parties on different media platforms. Adopting a critical discourse analysis approach, these studies examine discursive strategies employed in media representations of the protests and the ideologies and power struggles at play. It aims to present different perspectives towards the issue and shed light on the complex relations between language, media and politics in the representations of the Hong Kong protests.

Leaders of European right-wing populism (RWP) have developed speeches about the state border control required to protect the “people” electing them. Nevertheless, are these RWP narratives necessarily circulated during populist media events that take place in the symbolic locations of European integration? It is argued that border control discourse in these EU places can be mitigated by RWP actors, but also emphasized by the media depending on the separated predispositions of politicians and reporters to address the border issue in a given context. Bourdieusian “field theory” is used in this article to grasp the potential differentiated discursive positioning. Based on a comparative analysis of RWP media events organized in the town of Schengen in Luxembourg, the investigation allows us to shed new light on the specificities of populism in the media.

Figurative framing, in the form of metaphorical expressions, is especially effective in carrying conceptual content on an issue and affecting public opinion. One topic that has been heavily debated in contemporary Hungarian media is migration. Framing starts with the label that journalists select to refer to fled people: bevándorló (“immigrant”), migráns (“migrant”) or menekült (“refugee”). Depending on the label, different associations emerge, resting upon differing (metaphorical) conceptualizations evoked by the labels. We analysed metaphorical compounds based on the keywords in a media corpus of approx. 15 million words. Our results indicate that while all three keywords evoke predominantly negative frames and evaluations that build on stock metaphorical conceptualizations of fled people as also identified in the international literature – such as flood, object, business, war and crime –, the distribution of these metaphors does vary, depending on a) the selected keyword; and b) the political agenda of the media source.