Christianity and Islam in Opposing Positions of Right-Wing Populist Identity Foundations: Remarks on the Religious Discourse in the AfD

• Published in: Alman Dili ve Edebiyati Dergisi Vol. 2020; no. 44; p. 41
• Main Author: SCHUPPENER, Georg
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; German; Turkish
• Published: Istanbul Istanbul Universitesi/Istanbul University 01.01.2020
• Subjects: Election results; Populism; Religion; State elections
• ISSN: 1303-9407
• DOI: 10.26650/sdsl2020-0018

his paper presents a textual analysis of election posters and programs of the right-wing populist party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The role of religion is examined in these texts. A corpus of posters and programs from the period 2016– 19 were utilized for this analysis. The study covers all state elections in this period: the German federal elections of 2017 and the elections to the European Parliament in 2019. Since election posters can be understood as multimodal texts, image research was conducted first. This revealed that only a few religion-related motifs were used on election posters. This was also the case for the imagery in the election manifestos. The analysis of the lexicon yielded different results. For both types of texts, religion-related lexicons referring to Islam clearly dominate compared to Christianity. The lexical analysis also shows that the subject of Judaism does not play any significant role in either type of text. With regard to embedding in discourses, the context and metaphor analysis shows the references to religious issues found and delimit identity and alterity. In both cases, only the superficial and external aspects are referred to. Christianity, as an identity reference, remains completely unspecific, whereas Islam is used as a threat scenario. In not one case is there engagement with the contents of faith. The central result of the study is that right-wing populist election advertising is not about a real confrontation between Christianity and Islam. Rather, the election campaign focuses on the rejection of Islam and thus on the rejection of migration.