The so-called refugee crisis presents a field of discursive struggle over meanings in politics. In Austria, mediatized politics in 2015 and 2016 was dominated by metadiscursive negotiation of terminology related to building a border fence and setting a maximum limit on refugees. Both issues raised serious ideological and legal concerns and were thus largely euphemized; as responses to ever-increasing pressure from the political right, however, they were also intended as signals to voters. This article presents a discourse-historical study of the normalization of restrictive policies in the theoretical framework of border and body politics, otherness, and mediatization. © 2018 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC © 2018, © Markus Rheindorf and Ruth Wodak.

right-wing populism discourse-historical approach nationalism Discourse analysis border politics mediatization body politics Refugee crisis

political discourse nationalism refugee Austria populism voting behavior policy analysis