Bouchafra, S., & Åkerlund, M. (2026). ‘My Europe Builds Walls’: A cross-platform visual analysis of the Sweden Democrats’ 2024 EU election campaign. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251408336
Summary
This article analyses how the Sweden Democrats (SD), an authoritarian populist party, deployed visual securitising discourse across Facebook, X, and TikTok during their 2024 EU election campaign, built around the slogan “My Europe Builds Walls: Against Immigration, Against Criminal Gangs, Against Islamists.” Drawing on securitisation theory, populism studies, and digital political communication, the authors conduct a cross-platform multimodal critical discourse analysis of 293 posts to show that SD tailored content to each platform’s affordances and imagined audience. Facebook and X carried text-heavy, argumentative, seemingly informative content, while TikTok was dominated by affectively charged memes aimed at younger voters. The central argument is that authoritarian populist securitisation is platform-dependent and increasingly co-produced with audiences through remixable visual templates.
Key Contributions
- Extends populist political communication research into genuinely cross-platform, visually centred analysis of how securitisation is constructed across digital settings.
- Operationalises Bossetta’s digital architecture framework into four concrete analytical categories (media type, slogan-integrated references, content origin, temporal/cross-posting integration).
- Provides one of the first analyses of a Swedish party’s strategic TikTok use in an election campaign.
- Introduces the notion of platform-dependent securitisation that is co-produced with audiences via remixable templates, decentralising narrative production while preserving plausible deniability.
- Flags concerns about how AI-generated visual content may intensify these dynamics for misinformation and affective polarisation.
Methods
- Manual collection of 293 posts from SD’s official Facebook (78), X (92), and TikTok (123) accounts over the six-week campaign (25 April – 9 June 2024), filtered by references to EU/Europe/election/slogan.
- Comparative cross-platform analysis grounded in Bossetta’s (2018) digital architecture framework, focused on the functionality dimension.
- Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis combining Machin and Mayr’s toolkit with Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar, plus Martinec and Salway’s image-text relations.
- Reverse video searches to identify the geographic origin of clips embedded in TikTok memes.
Findings
- Memes made up 67.5% of all campaign posts; videos 17%; images ~13.5%; text-only posts just 1.3% (only on X).
- TikTok hosted the most content (123 posts), with 87% being memes, despite SD’s far smaller following there (~50,000) versus Facebook (~350,000) and X (~140,000).
- 91% of posts were original SD content; reposts (9%) appeared almost exclusively on X and often linked to mainstream and alternative news.
- Hashtags appeared in 45% of posts, but original-content hashtags (e.g. virality tags like fördig) were used only on TikTok.
- The slogan appeared in both visual and textual modes in 82% of posts; on TikTok it never appeared as text alone.
- Text-image relations differed by platform: “relay” and “enhancement/extension” on Facebook and X; “exemplification” on TikTok.
- TikTok memes frequently used footage from France, Germany, Spain, Ireland, and post-Brexit England, presented without geographic markers to imply Swedish/EU conditions — a form of embedded disinformation.
- SD’s vote share among Swedish 18–24-year-olds rose from 9% (2019) to 15% (2024) even as its overall EU vote share declined.
Connections
This paper’s focus on TikTok as a vector for far-right, memetic, affectively charged mobilisation connects directly to work on online radicalisation and platform-native extremist aesthetics such as Askanius2026-de, Grusauskaite2026-po, and Rothut2026-or / Rothut2026-wt. Its cross-platform campaign-communication lens and attention to visual/memetic content on TikTok also relate to Jurg2025-ur and to Nordic election-communication research such as Kalsnes2025-zb.
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