Introduction: The Power of Narratives in Political Contexts

Political entrepreneurs make targeted use of the narrative form of discourse to justify their positions and actions and to legitimise their role. In doing so, they take advantage of the complex functioning of narratives, which provides meaning, solves problems and generates knowledge. Particular attention is paid in this chapter to the functional interplay between order conceptions and the use of narratives. From a constructivist perspective, which means assigning them a reality-creating function, it analyses how political crises in particular represent the starting point for the formation of new or the adaptation of existing narratives. Furthermore, the implications of the almost exclusively authoritarian political systems and the highly unstable context of the southern and eastern countries of the Mediterranean are taken into account to enhance understanding of how the plausibility of this kind of political rhetoric is assessed by different receivers.