The texts of election programs are a promising source for the study of the German cultural politics. A number of properties of this source allow for exploring discursive forms and images of culture that are being constructed in a wide range of political ideologies. Election programs reflect and reproduce many well-established and shared positions, ideologies, concepts, institutional structures and long-term programs in the field of cultural politics. At the same time, the competitive nature of the elections forces federal parties to modify their texts, adapt them to changing socio-political realities, place new topics in the focus of consideration and appeal to various social groups. Of particular interest are the properties of the text and the discursive practices reflected in it, which redefine basic concepts, create new structural and conceptual hierarchies, which, in turn, leads to the restructuring and transformation of cultural politics. Based on the methodology of critical discourse analysis, this article examines the key issues of cultural politics in the election programs of the largest federal parties in Germany in 2021. Special attention is paid to multiple cultural images and linguistic means of construction. Comparative analysis of the texts allowed to identify the key polemical nodes, such as «culture of memory», «economization of culture», «attitude to the colonial past», «restitution of cultural objects», etc., where one can observe a struggle for the content of basic concepts, inclusion and exclusion of various social groups, and multiple discursive strategies for describing the past.
Germany; cultural politics; election programs; political parties; discourse analysis.