The Spectacle of "Patriotic Violence" in Romania: Populist Leader George Simion's Mediated Performance

Abstract

Political actors who adapt their performance to the logic of politainment gain visibility and success in the public sphere. Such is the case of George Simion, an emerging politician and leader of the newest parliamentary party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), a populist radical right party that proved especially attractive to Romanian diaspora voters. This study focuses on the discursive and stylistic dimensions of Simion's newsworthiness and mediatization. Additionally, a multiplatform analysis of his populist communication content and style aims to determine degrees of populism. As such, we propose a mixed-methods multimodal approach that combines corpus linguistics and semi-automated content analysis with thematic coding and visual semiotic analysis. The media-reported performance analysis focuses on content (n = 963) produced by three popular online news media outlets (Digi24.ro, Adevărul.ro, and Antena3.ro) between May 13th 2015 and April 30th 2022, while the analysis of Simion’s discourse examines his Telegram channel’s feed (738 messages and 383 images) between March 15th 2021 and April 30th 2022, and his authored texts published in Adevărul.ro (n = 116) between July 8th 2014 and April 30th 2022. The results indicate that news media reports are defined by conflict (aggression, violence), scandalization, negativity, emotionality, and by a prevalent use of arresting quotes that employ colloquial language (sarcasm, vulgarity). Simion’s celebrity populism is styled through an "ideal candidate," "populist campaigner" image and framed through the emotional glorification (unionism, patriotism, Orthodoxy) of a potentially united "homeland," a democratic space that reflects the unadulterated will of ordinary Christian-Orthodox Romanians whose sovereignty is currently undermined by corrupt political elites. He invokes historical narratives (e.g., founding fathers, retrospective utopia) reinforced through othering the EU and ethnic/sexual minorities as forces that threaten the purity of "the people."