Historical Narratives in the 2025 Czech Parliamentary Election Campaign: Strategic Mobilisation and Moral Polarisation

This article examines how historical narratives were mobilised in televised pre-election debates preceding the 2025 Czech parliamentary election and what political functions they performed within electoral competition. Drawing on theories of memory politics, symbolic politics, populist communication, and framing, the study conceptualises references to the past as strategic discursive instruments shaping contemporary political conflict. The analysis is based on a qualitative discourse analysis of debates broadcast by major Czech media outlets during the 2025 campaign.The findings demonstrate that history functioned primarily as a mechanism of emotional and moral mobilisation. Political actors framed issues such as migration, relations with the European Union, democracy, and national identity through analogies to normatively charged historical experiences, particularly the communist regime, the democratic breakthrough of 1989, and the Soviet invasion of 1968. Four dominant mechanisms were identified: analogical comparison, warnings against repeating past mistakes, the heroisation of democratic milestones, and relativising reinterpretations of historical parallels. These strategies moralised electoral competition and intensified value-based polarisation by transforming programmatic disagreements into existential conflicts over the direction of the state.