Transformation Appeals and Rural Populism: An Analysis on Populist Accounts of Ruralism in Lusatia (Lausitz)

• Applicants: Dr. Frank Meyer; Professorin Dr. Judith Miggelbrink
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 531002243

Even before the German Federal Government’s decision in 2020 to phase out coal, the Lusatia-region has faced the pressure to transform. This transformation involves a repeatedly voiced necessity to become "future-proof", and abandon the regional social, economic, infrastructural, symbolic, and political structures that have, for decades, been shaped by industrial extractivism. This pressure entails socioeconomical regionalized appeals by public (groups of) actors. In these appeals, the necessity, goal, and implementation of socioeconomic transformation - Lusatia’s disruptive departure from past economic structures - is publicly demanded and depicted as inevitable. From a conceptual point of view, transformation appeals are external stimuli that may trigger affirmative or aversive populist problematizations. We call these problematizations rural populism, meaning political-communicative heuristics that construct a societal ideal in opposition to externalized threats. This societal ideal engenders legitimacy via a condensation of (1) geographic, (2) temporal, and (3) group-based references. It operates with a distinction between "the people" and "the elite", considered typical for populism. Furthermore, the belonging to "the people" is decided upon (4) value-based distinctions, such as purity or virtuousness. The focus of our project is the relation between regionalized transformation appeals, and rural populism as a type of spatio-political problematization that aims to legitimize specific observations and narratives of rurality. We use a discourse-analytical approach to analyze populist discourses in the context of transformation appeals in and about Lusatia. In a first step, we will map out those actors engaged in the transformation discourse in Lusatia; in a second step, we will identify populist articulations. These articulations will be, in a third step, analysed according to the criteria of populism, using a critical discourse analysis. In a fourth step, we will reconstruct spatial imaginations of future Lusatia. The project will contribute to the political-scientific and political-geographic research on populism, to the research on peripheralization, and to our understanding of current debates on transformation and rural regions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants