‘Homeland farming’ or ‘rural emancipation’? The discursive overlap between populist and green parties in Hungary

Abstract

In their attempts to associate the nationalistic ideology with speculative promises to emancipate the people from malevolent ‘outsiders’, right-wing populists often engage with rural and agricultural topics. Meanwhile, green parties, commonly associated with the progressive ideas of environmentally friendly agriculture, occasionally employ the binary logic of agrarian populism. This paper has three objectives. First, to identify the discursive features of rural (right-wing and agrarian) populism. Second, to examine how these discursive differences unfold in agricultural, party politics. Third, to examine the implications of overlapping ideas of populist and green parties for emancipatory rural politics. The study is predominantly based on the analysis of political discourses in Hungary: Jobbik (right-wing populist) and LMP (green party), while the agricultural discourse of Fidesz, the ruling right-wing populist party will serve as the background to the analysis. Particular attention is given to the aesthetic, symbolic, and material dimensions of land in discourse, including environmentally friendly farming and the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).