Populist Elements in the Election Manifestoes of AfD and UKIP

Abstract

Abstract The term populism is omnipresent in current political science and political discourse. This paper discusses how so-called “populist” discourse is linguistically construed in the 2017 election manifestos of the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the British United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). It does so by operationalising populism concepts from political science, specifically the difference between exclusive and inclusive populism. In order to investigate how “populist” discourses depend on the respective political culture of a discourse community, these categories are employed in a corpus based comparative politico-linguistic analysis. Based on a corpus of German and British election manifestos from 2017, the paper demonstrates that both UKIP and the AfD combine elements of in inclusive populism based on demands of a democratic renewal, and an exclusive populism based on the idea the people as a homogeneous ethnos. The discursive realisation, however, differs because of general historic and political differences such as Britain being a state of four nations and the AfD aiming to avoid a rhetoric known from Germany’s past. Particularly pronounced are differences in the delineation to the enemy “European Union” as both parties link their euro-sceptical discourse to different central signifiers of the German and British political culture.