New Polish Right – politeness and radicalism. A corpus analysis of Krzysztof Bosak’s (de)legitimation strategies on twitter

Abstract

The article discusses (de)legitimation strategies of Krzysztof Bosak, one of the leaders of the Confederation Liberty and Independence, a Polish coalition of right-wing movements. The success of the formation appears to be in line with that of other European (far) right-wing parties, which have become politically relevant in recent decades. Despite the Confederation’s growing position in European politics, there is a paucity of research devoted to the party. The present paper attempts to bridge the gap by focusing on Bosak’s 2020 presidential campaign and the politician’s use of Twitter. In order to investigate Bosak’s discourse in detail, corpus linguistic methods were used. As they allow the researcher to work on large samples of data, Bosak’s tweets were investigated at both qualitative and quantitative levels. The results suggest that the candidate focused on legitimizing Catholicism and conservative ideas. At the same time, he delegitimised the left and LGBT communities, framing the presidential campaign as a clash between the conservative order.