The populist radical right (as defined by nativism, authoritarianism, and populism) often appeals to crisis situations to push policy and/or gain legitimacy but are in no way alone in doing so (Mudde, 2007). In this presentation, I will argue that their construction of crisis is noteworthy in form rather than content.This idea is supported by the paradigm of political semiotics (Selg & Ventsel, 2020), in which describing ideological content is secondary to explaining the meaning-making mechanisms (or translation strategies) behind it. Also incorporating different methods from cognitive linguistics (namely Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), the presentation seeks to model how the internal structures of populist radical right discourse on a given topic remain relatively stable, even when its content is subject to change.Source material for brief case studies comes from the discourse of the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE), the flagship populist radical right party of the region (Petsinis, 2019). Qualitative analysis of data from parliamentary debates and EKRE’s news media is mainly focused on their construal of police violence and COVID-19 countermeasures as forms of crisis.LiteratureLakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.Petsinis, V. (2019). Identity politics and right-wing populism in Estonia: The case of EKRE. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 25(2), 211–230.Selg, P., & Ventsel, A. (2020). Introducing Relational Political Analysis. Political Semiotics as a Theory and Method. Palgrave Macmillan.