Identità politica nei programmi elettorali dei partiti populisti tedeschi AfD e DIE LINKE

Abstract

The present essay proposes to investigate the linguistic strategies that the two German populist parties, the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the left-wing DIE LINKE, deploy in their electoral programs as a means of defining their identity with particular reference to three topics: 1. education and formation, 2. immigration and integration and 3. culture. The analysis, methodologically based on the frame semantics (Fillmore 1982, Busse 2012), shares Wodak’s (2015) assumption of populism as an empty rhetorical style that becomes either right-wing or left-wing according to the content with which it is loaded, as shown by the two election programmes which address these same issues from two perspectives and through partly common and partly different linguistic strategies.