Reclaiming Freedom, Reframing Truth: The Alt-Right as Pseudo-Minority Discourse

Resumo

This study examines how European Alt-Right elites construct legitimacy through “pseudo-minority” discourse. Four keynote speeches from CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) Hungary 2025 (Orbán, Meloni, Weidel, Wilders) were analyzed using theory-driven thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) within a social constructionist framework, informed by Social Representations Theory and Minority Influence Theory. Findings reveal a recursive rhetorical architecture that first anchors political issues as existential moral threats (e.g., “civilization under attack”), converting diffuse anxiety into shared social representations. Second, leaders perform a “pseudo-minority” style by displaying high consistency and moral investment, a discursive strategy that theoretically triggers socio-cognitive conflict while bypassing the psychological dismissal typically associated with rigidity. Co-occurrence analysis indicates that the frequent pairing of rigid imperatives with value-bridges provides a linguistic framework for the incremental normalization of exclusionary values. These results identify the discursive pathways through which Alt-Right influence simulates the conditions for latent conversion, facilitating a long-term transformation of the moral 'common sense' that is theoretically consistent with simultaneous public bipolarization and delayed private agreement.