... SPIEGEL: Ms Schutzbach, Björn Höcke recently canceled an interview with ZDF. The colleagues had submitted to his AFD party members quotes from his book as well as from Hitler's "Mein Kampf", the distinction was difficult for the respondents. Confronted with the answers, Höcke broke off the conversation. What do you think of the journalists' strategy: did they expose a right-wing ideologue?
Franziska Schutzbach: I think it wise to deny someone like Höcke, to enter his usual playgrounds. Instead of letting him lecture on Islam or pork bans, they insisted on deconstructing the ideological dimensions of his actions. Because Höcke is not about day politics, but about social change. A plan that is not far from that of the Nazis. That this tradition was revealed has taken him by surprise. The political scientist Natascha Strobl has analyzed this precisely: Because the journalists and Höcke on different discourse levels struggled, Höcke has terminated the interview.
SPIEGEL: Is this media strategy or spontaneous reaction?
Schutzbach: That's certainly a bit of a calculation. If right-wing populists can not do their usual self-staging, they break off and threaten. He who asks critical questions is an enemy. Höcke has shown his authoritarian core, but unfortunately he was not disenchanted.
SPIEGEL: Why not?
Schutzbach: Journalists are pushed to their limits by right-wing populist strategists: they can use every form of attention, even negative ones. That we are leading this debate, the AfD will use again. Because with the interview Höcke was able to stage himself as a victim of the media and courageous taboo breaker. Besides, we know about him that he belongs to the fascist wing of the AfD. We do not have to talk or interview him to show that.
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Franziska Schutzbach
The rhetoric of the Right: An overview of right-wing populist discourse strategies
Publishing company:
shrew
Pages:
143
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EUR 18,00
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SPIEGEL: In your book you describe 20 important discourse strategies of right-wing populists, such as critique of the "elite" or the establishment of a friend-enemy schema. But what makes her rhetoric?
Schutzbach: It establishes links with the conservatives, including liberals, even leftists. It has a hinge function to make right-wing ideology suitable for the masses and compatible with the bourgeois middle class. Central is there, by means of a distorted representation of reality, to stir up fear and hatred - for example, with the now familiar terms "refugee flow" or "Islamization of the West".
SPIEGEL: As another important strategy, you name, for example, the "Entdiabolisation", a term that goes back to Marine Le Pen. What do you mean by that?
Schutzbach: The Front National, but also about the Sweden Democrats or the AfD wanted to miss a bourgeois coat of paint. Entdiabolisation means, instead of right-wing extremist values, claiming civic and freedom of expression, self-determination and freedom for oneself. The goal is to make the extremist elements of the parties ambiguous. Right-wing populists thus fulfill a paradoxical double role of bourgeoisie and extremism, which has hitherto been absorbed. So it is with the equidistance.
SPIEGEL: What is that?
Schutzbach: That's the strategy that seems to float above all categories. Frauke Petry, for example, once said that she was not on the right or on the left. In this way, right-wing populists appear as central and non-ideological. This can disguise the right potential and be a serious, reasonable alternative.
"We should not talk to them anymore, but talk about them"
SPIEGEL: How did these strategies come about?
Schutzbach: The popular rhetorical figure of "political correctness", with which human rights and equality are discredited as political tyranny, goes back to the Reagan era, for example, which was a strategy of the US election campaign. In the nineties, it was transferred by anti-Semitic, right-wing conspiracy theorists in the German-speaking countries. Today, this concept is also socially acceptable, because the political features have cheered him so long, until democratic premises such as human rights or equality under suspicion. That is why right-wing populists today can claim that their proclamation is totalitarian.
SPIEGEL: That was also accused to the singer Herbert Grönemeyer, when he loudly positioned himself against fascism at a concert.
Schutzbach: It is today an expression of alleged liberal freedom, even punk, to be sexist or racist and to speak of "left-wing dictatorship". And it allows right-wing populists to stage themselves as freedom fighters for democracy. In reality, however, they mean "freedom", the questioning of egalitarianism, the aim is a society that is again organized hierarchically, in which not all people are worth the same.
SPIEGEL: Arguably, right-wing populists can not be invalidated because they deal with emotions. If you make fun of them, they stylize themselves as victims. Does only help ignorance?
Schutzbach: It depends on the kind of non-observance: We should no longer offer them a stage, but talk about them - so analyze Höckes language, his thinking, his book. We must not underestimate the New Right or dismiss it as unimportant. There is no doubt that there are right-wing forces who want to take power. But we should not exaggerate their subversive phantasms and help make them even more meaningful.
SPIEGEL: Many people feel powerless, even in their private lives. How can we counter these discourses in everyday life?
Schutzbach: Although I am not in favor of talking to right-wing ideologues, they are still people who are drifting to the right. We should quarrel with them and make it clear that we disagree with them. That we do not see ourselves as "the people" of whom the AfD always speaks.