Radical right populist entrepreneurs and the use of religious representations through popular culture: George Becali as the ‘Saviour of Romania’

Abstract

While there are a few significant studies on the varieties of populism in post-socialist Romania, little scholarly work on populists’ ethos of religious inspiration exists. This article addresses this lacuna from a cultural studies perspective, exploring popular culture’s productions of religious inspiration employed by the radical right populist entrepreneur George Becali, and it argues that the diversity of religiously encumbered cultural productions provide a significant insight into fleshing out the mechanisms of his messianic neo-populism. By employing a critical visual analysis and hermeneutics, this article aims to illuminate how a populist entrepreneur attracts potential supporters by using the rhetoric of nativism and ‘neo-traditional, autochthonous culture and religion’, purporting to reveal a mutual cultural ground between the messianic leader and ‘the people’. His political strategies are oftentimes packaged in cultural formats and discourses emphasising local religious symbolism that turns him into a ‘Saviour of the Nation’. Yet, at the same time, the article demonstrates that popular culture can also constitute a foundation for resisting the populist’s kit of religiously loaded visual rhetoric.