101 THE STRATEGY OF DISCURSIVE PROVOCATION: A DISCOURSE-HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF THE FPÖ’S DISCRIMINATORY RHETORIC Ruth Wodak Socio-political and historical context In their political discourse in general, and especially in their past election campaigns, the FPÖ (the Austrian Freedom Party; Freiheitliche Partei Öster- reichs) 1 has developed specific discursive patterns that have been widely dis- cussed in the media, as well as in scholarly research. 2 When summarizing the results of these studies, particular dynamic patterns have been shown to emerge time and again, albeit with certain variations. The campaigns have integrated a range of traditional means of election campaigning (which include events both small and large, spanning speeches and other performances by the top candidates in public spaces, beer tents and discotheques; posters, advertisements, party-run newspapers, media appearances, distribution of printed materials, and so on) with new social media (the World Wide Web, brochures designed to look like comic books, a rap-song specifically written for, and performed by, the party leader). 3 This has effectively opened up new avenues of communication with diverse target groups, as well as created a whole network of texts and images intertwined in subtle inter-textual ways with each other. The contents distributed by such means include open and coded constructions of marginalizing and discrimina- tory statements that draw on xenophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, homo- phobic and other resentments. Examples from earlier election campaigns include, for instance, the slo- gans ‘Daham statt Islam’ (‘at home instead of Islam’) 4 in 2006 or ‘Abendland in Christenhand’ (‘The Occident in Christian hands’) in 2009. While such statements regularly test the boundaries of the socially acceptable and legally permissible, it is rare for a slogan to cross the legal boundaries of freedom of speech, although moral thresholds defined by mainstream society are often