In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, the greatest global event of mass death in the 21st century, my lecture focuses on the communication strategies of far-right populist leaders Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in the first wave of infections (March June 2020). Elected on the basis of a political rhetoric that framed people-as-victims and promised to protect people from their perceived enemies (the “corrupt elites” or the “migrants”), these leaders nonetheless managed to top global death rankings during the first wave. Starting from this “paradox of victimhood”, I ask how each one of them managed to communicate the suffering and death of Covid-19, largely caused by their own policies, to their national communities. An obvious response would be that they did so through lies. While this is certainly the case, my argument is that we need to go beyond the singular focus on fake news and analyse far-right populist communication as a broader set of symbolic strategies that seeks to erase the pain and grief of ordinary people and present far-right activists as, themselves, the victims of oppression. This critical analysis, I contend, has something important to tell us not so much about these leaders’ pandemic failures, but importantly, about the place and role of victimhood in far-right populism and contemporary culture at large. I conclude with reflections on how the vocabulary of victimhood could be reclaimed and used in ways that benefit the structurally vulnerable, empowering cultures of solidarity, and protesting against systems of cruelty and oppression.

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work focuses on the ethical and political complexities of communicating human suffering in the media. Her most recent work is on the cultural politics of victimhood in western societies. Her book on the topic, entitled “Wronged. The Weaponization of Victimhood”, is forthcoming in Columbia University Press in May this year. Other book publications include 'Discourse in Late Modernity’ (co-authored 1999), ‘The Spectatorship of Suffering’ (2006), ‘The Soft Power of War’ (ed., 2008), ‘The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication’ (co-ed, 2021) and ‘The Digital Border. Mobility, Technology, Power (co-authored, 2022). She is the recipient of two LSE Teaching Excellence Award and five international awards for her research publications, including the Outstanding Book of the Year award of the International Communication Association (2015, for ‘The Ironic Spectator. Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism’); as well as a lifetime Fellowship of the International Communication Association (2020).