Real vs. Performed Crisis in Populist Discourse

Populists flourish in time of crisis – be that real or imaginary. The populist performance of crisis allows politicians to forward their political agenda, maintain their popularity and strengthen their grip on power under the pretext of the righteous fight to save national interest in crisis. The Hungarian PM, Viktor Orbán, the longest ruling populist leader of the world, excels in performing crises: over the past 14 years, he rallied the support of the people claiming to fight an economic crisis, a migration crisis, crises with civic and liberal NGOs, the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine. We claim, irrespective of whether the crisis is real or imaginary, Orbán uses the very same populist discursive strategies, just adjusting the narrative to serve his actual needs. Every crisis – be that real or imaginary – is performed to establish Orbán and his regime as savior of Hungary. We demonstrate this by closely examining his discourse in the refugee crisis vs. his narrative targeting refugees from the war in Ukraine. We explore all Orbán’s speeches delivered between January 2014 and December 2023 to examine comparatively his political communication strategies in the two migration crises by applying techniques of natural language processing. We build structural topic models to explore the most dominant themes of the speeches and we study the evolution of topics over time. We use discourse- and syntactic analysis to understand the deeper cohesion of his words and political messages, arguing that both the 2015 refugee crisis as well as the Ukrainian refugee flood are in fact performed crises, rather than real crises. This way, back in 2015, Orbán has rallied people framing migrants as the enemies of the nation, and his speeches constructed a hostile atmosphere and increased xenophobia among citizens to cement electoral support for the regime. With the start of the Ukraine war, Orbán has reworked this political communication strategy and defined different types of migrants not to break his anti-migrant discourse, which portrays immigration as an ever-present threat to Hungarians. Since 2022, deliberate differentiation is made between refugees arriving from Ukraine and those from other countries and conflicts: ‘Ukrainian refugees’ are welcome, while all others, the ‘illegal migrants’ need to be kept out at all costs. In turn, this arbitrary discrimination among refugees allows for simultaneously claiming Hungary will help those in need but will not let any migrants in. This way, Orbán supports Ukrainian refugees and at the same time spreads Russian propaganda, presenting an ambiguous narrative on these controversial topics to the Hungarian people. Claiming he will not allow Hungary to be drawn into the conflict, the real crisis of the war is thus turned into a performed crisis to serve Orbán’s major goal – to rally support for his increasing authoritarian regime.