The populist crisis narrative: A qualitative analysis of the AfD's election campaign communication on Facebook

Narratives are stories that give the possibility of understanding and interpreting reality on both an individual and collective level. They are present in everyday communication and incorporate a normative perspective. Narratives are characterised by a specific kind of syntax: Current societal events are often processed in narrative form by interrelating them with past events and identifying important actors. Narratives play a central role in the construction of political behaviour and political communication as well. With the rise of populism in the last few decades, the relationship of language and politics has be- come more prominent in public discussion. Besides the oversimplification of most societal problems resulting from the antagonism between the elite and the people, the usage of especially polarising and emotional rhetoric is attributed to populism. While this kind of populist communication is frequently studied, narratives are seldom part of these analyses. Hence, this article turns to the inductive analysis of narrative structures in the election campaign of the currently most successful populist party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Their 2017 federal election campaign on Facebook serves as a database for the qualitative analysis following the Grounded Theory Method. This method is especially suitable for data-driven narrative analysis since it is designed to help identify underlying meaning and rhetorical structures. Ultimately, the underlying narrative of the election campaign is extracted, which shows the AID's ideological alignment and thus its interpretation of reality.