To Örebro University

Looking at mediated, political and wider public discourses on immigration in Poland since 2015 and exploring these in the context of the country's right-wing populist politics, the paper develops a multi-step normalisation model which allows analysing how radical or often blatantly racist discourse can not only be strategically introduced into the public domain but also evolve into an acceptable and legitimate perspective inperceptions of immigrants and refugees. The paper highlights the strategic as well as opportunistic introduction of anti-immigration rhetoric in/by the political mainstream in Poland in recent years, often on the back of the so-called post-2014 European "Refugee Crisis". It explores normalisation as part and parcel of a wider multistep process of strategically orchestrated discursive shifts wherein discourses characterised by extreme positions have been enacted, gradated/perpetuated and eventually normalisedas an integral part of pronounced right-wing populist agenda. The paperfurthers a view that normalisation entails the creation and sustainment of a peculiar borderline discourse wherein unmitigated radical statements are often married with seemingly civil and apparently politically correct language and argumentation. The latter are used to pre-/legitimise uncivil or even outright radical positions and ideologies by rationalising them and making them into acceptable elements of public discourse.

This article explores the discourse-conceptual linkages between ‘Brexit’ and ‘crisis’ in European news media reporting about the UK referendum on leaving the European Union of 23 June 2016. The study examines media discourse about the Brexit vote in Austria, Germany, Poland and Sweden at the transformative moment in between the pre/after vote period. The conceptuallyoriented critical discourse analysis shows how Brexit was not only constructed as an imaginary or a future crisis but also how its mediated visions were made real by recontextualising elements of various past social/political/economic crises. As is shown, such a strategy of discursively amalgamating the real and the imaginary, as well as the experienced/past and the expected/future, often allowed constructing Brexit as one of the most significant, critical occurrences of post-War Europe. Through the analysis, the article aims to show how wide and diverse the importance of ‘Brexit as crisis’ has been for European news media discourse. It also emphasises that while in the UK itself – including huge part of the UK traditional media – the critical nature of Brexit was often strategically downplayed, the wider European discourse would see it as a multifaceted ‘crisis’ of huge significance to both the present and the future of the EU, wider Europe and the world.

This essay illustrates the extent to which crisis has had an impact on public perceptions and discourses of contemporary migration in Poland. We focus on the actual moment of the coming together' between crisis- and immigration-related discourses and argue that this connection has arisen as part of the recent political strategies of Poland's right-wing populist government Law and Justice' (PiS) party. The strong anti-immigration and anti-refugee rhetoric orchestrated by PiS across the Polish public sphere has also played a pivotal role in countenancing xenophobic as well as outright racist sentiments in wider Polish public discourse and society.

This paper analyzes politicization and mediatization of immigration in Poland in the context of the recent European "refugee crisis." Although largely absent from Polish political discourse after 1989, anti-refugee and anti-immigration rhetoric has recently become extremely politically potent in Poland. The analysis shows that, soon taken over by other political groups, the new anti-immigration discourses have been enacted in Poland's public sphere by the right-wing populist party PiS (Law and Justice). Its discourse in offline and online media has drawn on discursive patterns including Islamophobia, Euro-scepticism, anti-internationalism, and historical patterns and templates of discrimination such as anti-Semitism.