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‘My Europe Builds Walls’: A cross-platform visual analysis of the Sweden Democrats’ 2024 EU election campaign

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‘My Europe Builds Walls’: A cross-platform visual analysis of the Sweden Democrats’ 2024 EU election campaign

Summary

This article analyses how the Sweden Democrats (SD), a Swedish authoritarian populist party, constructed 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.” Through a cross-platform multimodal critical discourse analysis of 293 posts, Bouchafra and Åkerlund argue that SD strategically tailored content to each platform’s functionality and audience: argumentative, text-heavy persuasion on Facebook and X, but affectively charged, remixable memes on TikTok aimed at young voters. The paper shows that visual securitisation is platform-dependent and increasingly co-produced with supporters via shareable templates, while foreign footage is repurposed to manufacture a sense of domestic crisis.

Key Contributions

  • Provides a rare genuinely cross-platform, visually centred analysis of authoritarian populist communication during an election campaign.
  • Operationalises Bossetta’s (2018) digital architecture framework into four analytical categories (media type, slogan integration, content origin, temporal integration).
  • Offers one of the first close readings of a Swedish party’s strategic use of TikTok.
  • Introduces the idea of platform-dependent, audience-co-produced securitisation through remixable meme templates.
  • Flags the implications of foreign-footage repurposing as embedded disinformation, and gestures at how generative AI may intensify these dynamics.

Methods

The authors manually collected 293 posts from SD’s official Facebook (78), X (92), and TikTok (123) accounts during the six-week campaign period (25 April – 9 June 2024), filtered by EU/election/slogan-related keywords. Analysis combined Bossetta’s digital architecture framework with Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Machin & Mayr; Kress & van Leeuwen; Martinec & Salway), attending to referential, predicational, and argumentation strategies, viewer-actor positioning, and image-text relations. Reverse video searches were used to trace the geographic provenance of clips embedded in TikTok memes.

Findings

  • Memes dominated SD’s campaign (67.5% of posts), with text-only posts almost absent (1.3%, X only).
  • TikTok carried the most content (123 posts, 87% memes) despite having SD’s smallest follower base (~50k vs ~350k on Facebook and ~140k on X), evidencing deliberate prioritisation of younger audiences.
  • 91% of posts were SD original content; reposts (9%) clustered on X and often linked to mainstream or alternative news.
  • Hashtags appeared in 45% of posts overall but were used in original SD content only on TikTok, exploiting virality tags like fördig.
  • The campaign slogan appeared visually and textually in 82% of posts; on TikTok it was always visually present, never text-only.
  • Image-text relations varied by platform: relay/enhancement on Facebook and X; exemplification on TikTok, where a brick wall animation was paired with clips of non-white men in scenes of violence or unrest.
  • TikTok memes routinely used footage from France, Germany, Spain, Ireland, and post-Brexit England without geographic markers, implying these scenes occurred in Sweden or the EU.
  • SD’s vote share among Swedish 18–24-year-olds rose from 9% (2019) to 15% (2024), even as overall EU vote share declined.

Connections

This paper sits closest to Rothut2026-wt and Karo2026-dn in its focus on how far-right actors operationalise platform affordances and visual/memetic content to mobilise audiences, and it complements Bailard2024-pj on the broader question of how digital infrastructures shape radical political communication. Its emphasis on audience-co-produced securitisation via remixable templates offers a distinctive angle on the participatory side of contemporary far-right online ecosystems that these neighbouring works largely treat from reception or platform-governance perspectives.

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