Portraitfoto Jan Schulze Buschoff

Jan Schulze Buschoff

New party line and the attempt to assume power: How Marine Le Pen transforms the Rassemblement national from a fringe group to a people’s party

Until 2018 the French right-wing extremist party National Rally did business under the name of National Front. Since its change of leadership in 2011, the party transformed to a middle-class image. Despite its effort to „dedemonise“ itself from right-wing extremist prejudices, the party remains within a right-wing extremist structure. This raises the question how this party is able to defend democratic-republican values not only by tolerating its right-wing extremist disposition, but by promoting it. This contradiction between seemingly democratic actions and nationalistic thinking requires an accurate investigation of the National Rally. The aim of my project is to determine what communicative strategies the party uses to get rid of its right-wing extremist image. Therefore, I work with the Hegemonic Theory from Laclau and Mouffe to use it within a discourse analysis so as to expose the approach of the NR.

Contact
Research Interests
  • Radical Democratic Theory
  • Discourse Analysis
  • Populism
  • Extremism
  • Totalitarism
  • Nationalism
Vita
  • Since 2019
    PhD candidate, University of Bremen.
  • 2016
    M.A. International Relations, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.
  • 2014 – 2015
    Rennes Institute of Political Studies.
  • 2013
    B.A. Romance Philology and Historical Science, University of Bremen.
Talks, Workshops, and Events
  • 2021
    Conference Settings of Communication Studies: Germany and France.
  • 2021
    Conference Journalism and Populism.
Back to overview
problem to be solved

“Contradiction is not primarily a problem to be solved but a motor we cannot do without.”

Martin Nonhoff
l’illusion d’une unité

“Foucault speaks of contradiction as l’illusion d’une unité.”

Ingo H. Warnke
space

“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.

Julia Lossau
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
coherence in thought

“The imperative of non-contradiction generally produces a coherence in thought that is often at odds with social complexities.”

Yan Suarsana