Browsing by Subject "Religious populism / Populism / Right-wing populism / political parties / Rhetorical analysis"

The popularity of populism, especially right-wing populism, has been one of the most central global political trends of the 21st century. One central aspect of right-wing populism is its close relationship to Christianity and the product of this collaboration is religious populism. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze whether this closeness is true in Finnish political context. I have examined whether the populist and religious populist rhetoric was used in three proceedings of the commonly called trans-law in the Finnish Parliament between 2022 and 2023. According to my research, political speech combines the three core features of the populist style: built-in demagogy, performance of threats and bad manners (Moffitt 2016) and uses religion as a framing device counts as religious populism. The amount of populist rhetoric in my data was significant. According to the data analysis several representatives use a lot of different populist style rhetorical means and religious populism in their political speech. Demagogy appeared both as traditional dichotomy between the people and the elite as well as between liberal and conservative representatives. The bad manners appeared mostly as colorful and informal self-expression and within the use of false information. The performance of various crises, threats and collapses was appearing primarily as a concern about the fundamental collapse of the values of the Finnish welfare state. As a conclusion it can be said that the use of religious populist style in Finland follows largely the same legalities than abroad. All of these enable religion and its symbolism and tradition to be utilized in different ways. This research backs up the consensus about religious populism being a global phenomenon and somehow similar regardless of the local context. According to the results of my analysis, in Finland, religion was used in many ways as a rhetorical device as part of political speech.