From hegemonic consensus to polarisation: Austrian public discourse on Israel’s war in Gaza

This article examines how Austrian public discourse on Israel’s war in Gaza shifted from hegemonic consensus to pronounced polarisation between October 2023 and September 2025. Drawing on a multi-domain corpus of political, media, and social media texts, and combining the Discourse-Historical Approach with Corpus-Based Narrative Analysis, the study triangulates representation, argumentation, and narrative to trace the evolution of antagonistic positions. The analysis shows how initial elite consensus in support of Israel fractured unevenly: political discourse remained unified longer, while media began to diverge earlier, and social media displayed polarisation from the outset. In line with Critical Discourse Studies, the paper highlights how polarisation is not simply a division of views but a discursive mechanism of power, silencing pro-Palestinian voices while legitimising hegemonic alignments. The study contributes methodologically by extending DHA with a systematic narrative dimension, bridging corpus-assisted and qualitative analysis to capture polarisation as a dynamic process. In doing so, it advances CDS debates on antagonistic binaries and demonstrates how hegemonic consensus can unravel into competing repertoires of legitimation, humanitarianism, and memory politics.