Populism in the Political Communication of Populist and Non Populist Actors: A Case Study of the Czech 2021 Parliamentary Elections

The case study focuses on populist discourse in the political communication of selected Czech political actors on Facebook and Twitter. It focuses on the period of campaigns in the last fortnight before the October 2021 parliamentary elections. The research sample includes online political communication of leaders of both populist (Andrej Babiš and Tomio Okamura) and non-populist parties (Markéta Pekarová Adamová and Vít Rakušan). The research is approached using the critical discursive analysis, inspired mainly by Fairclough's approach. The research showed that the political actors under study made full use of the functions of social networks, both for communication with voters and for self-promotion or defining themselves against political opponents. All the actors used populist elements in their online political communication, with the focus of the communication on their opponents rather than on specific social issues. However, a detailed analysis of the linguistic and discursive elements of populism for each actor revealed that the discourse of political actors under study differed significantly.