Atitudini și discursuri populiste în România. Dinamici în 2019-2021 și posibile explicații ale impactului AUR = Populist attitudens and discourse în Romania. Evolutions in 2019-2021 & possibile explanations of the impact of the AUR party

Abstract

Evaluating the populist phenomenon in a country like Romania is a complex research objective and requires an important distinction between two dimensions – effectively measuring the public’s populist predispositions, regardless of party affinities, and evaluating the ideological discourse of the main parties as well as the relationship between these ideological approaches and the populist attitudes in society. In this study, we evaluated the current state of the populist inclinations of the voting-age population in Romania, and also the ideological mechanisms that have recently stimulated these populist attitudes. We analyzed whether we can observe a rise in populist attitudes in Romania in recent years, especially in the context of the emergence of a new political force with populist and ultra-nationalist discourse. We also evaluate the evolution of this type of ideologic discourse during the last year, as well as its relation to earlier populist political discourses in Romania. We operate on the premise that parties can have populist approaches independently from the ideology they support, and also that understanding the relation between (political) discourse and populist orientation (of the public) is relevant.