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Europe and now the United States are characterized by the growing presence of populist parties and leaders able to attract a significant share of the electorate. The successful strategy of right-wing populist politicians consists in proposing a series of discourses based on a differentiation between an endangered “Us” and a threatening “Them.” The protection of the “Us” community from the evil “Them” is often expressed through the necessity of closing the national border. This measure is a key discursive resource incorporated in their speeches. However, is the border only presented by right-wing populist leaders as a boundary which has to be controlled, securitized, and sealed? Based on the analysis of discourses produced by Viktor Orbán, the only long-standing European populist leader in power, the research shows that right-wing populist discourses can be based on opposed and complementary conceptions of the state border to entrench the opposition between “Us” and “Them.”
Lamour et al. (Sat,) studied this question.