Populism in Times of a Pandemic

What is it about?

We analysed a sample of Facebook posts and press releases of six parties – two each, one on the right and one on the left, from France, Germany, and Spain – to ask how they structure their discourse about the COVID-19 pandemic from February 2020 until February 2021. The parties are all ‘populist’ in the sense that they frame politics in terms of the true people and the corrupt elite. The right-wing parties have an exclusive definition of the people based on culture or ethnicity, while the left-wing parties have an inclusive definition in relation to culture and ethnicity because they define the people using other cleavage lines like class. We identified the relevant Facebook posts and press releases using keywords, followed inductive techniques to identify key concepts in the discourse, and then coded those key concepts in terms of the kinds of argument in which they were embedded. This allowed us to establish the relative frequency with which certain themes are raised by individual parties and to compare the relative emphasis and focus across parties. We highlighted how that critique differs from one national context to the next and across ideological boundaries. After going through the individual cases, we engage in a discussion about populism as a ‘thin’ ideology and support arguments to recognize alternatives in populism research._x000D_ _x000D_

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