False labeling and double standards in the populist discourse of the Law and Justice party when it became the opposition

Abstract

The aim of the study is to analyze false labeling and double standards in the populist discourse of the “new” opposition – the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which lost the 2023 Polish parliamentary elections after 8 years rule. The data used in the study come from our corpus of Polish political discourse. The theoretical framework within which the analysis has been conducted is the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Studies. The discourse has been analyzed in terms of its content, discursive strategies, linguistic expressions and rhetorical devices and context. The main findings of the study allowed us to formulate the following conclusions: The PiS party evaluation of the Polish political reality involves double standards and the biased use of false labeling. PiS rhetoric resembles Hitler’s and Donald Trump’s rhetorical styles. The strategy “call them what they call you” is frequently employed in negative presentations of the current governing coalition.

Keywords

political discourse populism false labeling rhetoric democracy the rule of law Critical Discourse Studies

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