Billboard competition: Linguistic and visual analysis of political billboards of the 2022 parliamentary elections in Hungary. (original) (raw)

On 3rd April 2022 parliamentary elections were held in Hungary. Both the governing coalition and the opposition parties campaigned to get into government, and the campaign could be followed through billboards as well. This paper focuses on billboards of both the government and the opposition side. The study seeks to answer the question of what specific linguistic and visual means are used to achieve the desired effect of influencing voters and what communication methods are used by billboard makers. The study interprets the billboards as multimodal texts and analyses the combined meaning of the textual message and the visual world. The comparison of the billboards shows that the FIDESZ-KDNP coalition was more successful to identify the leader of the opposing coalition, Péter Márki-Zay with the negative past and itself with the positive future. Based on the results of the 2022 election we can say that the visual, easy-tounderstand representation of the simple message of FIDESZ-KDNP had a greater impact on voters than the textual messages of the United for Hungary coalition.