Jan Chovanec 31 UDC 81’42:32.019.5 Jan Chovanec Masaryk University, Brno PERFORMING POPULIST STYLE IN CONTEXT Abstract: Adopting the defnition of populism as a political style and performance, this article deals with the contextualized performance of populist rhetoric. Drawing on data from a videoblog on current afairs produced by the head of the most prominent Czech populist party, the analysis documents some of the typical features of populist discourse, e.g. the discursive construction of a narrative of threat, the intentional production of scandal talk, and the extreme othering of outgroups, particularly elite social actors (the media, the mainstream media, the EU) that are deemed not to represent the real interests of the people. Te paper argues that public performances of populist politicians skilfully exploit various forms of context and intertextuality in order to foster their anti-establishment agenda. Key words: populism; style; discourse; social media; scandal talk 1. Introduction Although political communication has been the focus of scholars for a long time, it is only in recent years that a more systematic attention is being paid to the phenomenon of ‘populism’, particularly in connection with the rise of various populist movements across Europe. However, the concept of populism is rather elusive and escapes an easy defnition. While populism can be both right-wing (Wodak et al., 2013) and lef-wing (Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014), there appears to be some agreement that it is not an independent political ideology but, rather, a largely discursive phenomenon that emphasizes the undesirable separation of ‘the elites’ from ‘the common people’ (Moftt, 2016; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2018) and creates feelings of fear and threat (Wodak, 2015). Adopting Benjamin Moftt’s (2016) defnition of populism as a political style and performance, this article seeks to trace some of the linguistic repertoires available to politicians and the ways in which they skilfully draw on shared cultural context. Tus, populism is a phenomenon that can be traced on the macro-level as the rhetorical deployment of particular themes, as well as on the micro-level of linguistic analysis – it is not so much a political programme as a form of political communication (cf. Ekström et al., 2019). Populist media performances tend to be heavily contextualized speech events because they need to relate to cultural stereotypes that are shared, easily understood and taken for granted by the audience. Using data from Czech politics, the article documents some of the characteristic features of populist discourse, such as the vilifcation of elites, the populists’ self- presentation as victims of multiple ‘others’, and the enhancement of the narrative Chovanec, Jan (2020) 'Performing populist style in context'. In: Lopičić, Vesna and Biljana Mišić Ilić (eds.) Jezik, književnost, kontext. Language, Literature, Context. Niš: University of Niš, 31-44.