Fire, police cars and barricade tape: exploring visual securitisation in Sweden Democrats’ Instagram posts

ABSTRACT

With the growing popularity of visual-centred social media, authoritarian populist parties are provided with more platforms and devices to position themselves as key securitising actors by engaging in the visual securitisation of issues related to immigration, law and order. This paper uses the 2022 Swedish electoral campaign as a case study to explore the securitisation in the visual discourse of authoritarian populist actors by comparing the Sweden Democrats to the mainstream right. Through a combination of thematic and multimodal critical discourse analyses, this study examined a total of 639 Instagram posts. It shows how the Sweden Democrats use semiotic strategies to represent social actors in a way that conveys the message of securitisation. The findings reveal that the authoritarian populist party adopts a visual securitising style that not only includes apparent populist aspects and relies on the linguistic elements to counterbalance the ambiguity of the image, but it is also distinct from the discursive style of the mainstream right.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual securitisation
• visual politics
• authoritarian populism
• multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA)
• semiotic strategies

Introduction

Over the past decade, the authoritarian populist movement has been gaining momentum and traction across Europe. Recent elections in Italy, France, the Netherlands and Sweden bear witness to its growing electoral strength as the authoritarian populist parties collected unprecedented and larger shares of the vote (Pew Research Center 2022). A number of studies has related this expanding popularity to their discourses centred around the everyday uncertainties and societal insecurities (Kurylo 2022; Steele and Homolar 2019) in which they pledge to restore national sovereignty and implement policies that prioritise “the people” and ultimately emphasise the division between the in- and out-groups (Hogan and Haltinner 2015; Huysmans 2005; Wodak 2015). By evoking concepts of fear, crisis and threat, authoritarian populist parties picture themselves as important “securitising actors” (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998) with the power to articulate security issues and defend the common people against ontological threats (Kinnvall 2019; Kurylo 2022; Wojczewski 2020) or as Wodak puts it plainly: these parties “successfully create fear and legitimise their policy proposals with an appeal to the necessities of security” (2015, 5). The act of securitising is therefore intrinsically ingrained in populist discourse. Populist actors, especially authoritarian ones, perform securitisation in their discourse by transforming political matters into security issues (Kurylo 2022).

Considering this argument, one would rightfully ask whether securitisation is nowadays distinctive of authoritarian populist discourse or can be detected in other political rhetorics. Part of the answer lies in what Kallis (2013) has called the “Far-right contagion.” The authoritarian populist discourse has become mainstreamed (Bayerlein 2021; Cammaerts 2018; Mudde 2019). This process has resulted in seeing populist radical right parties and mainstream right parties increasingly rallying their audiences around the same issues, adopting identical positions, and providing similar solutions (Mudde 2019). Most of this ideological shift has been materialised on a discursive level. While the far-right actors have re-packaged their ideas and discourse to attract a larger public (Cammaerts 2018), their standpoints on immigration, national identity and security have long been embraced by mainstream parties (Kallis 2013). Against this backdrop, this article deems it important to compare mainstream right and authoritarian populist securitising discourses.

With the emergence of new modes of display and expression in political communication as result of social media use, this discursive construction of (in)security and its mainstreaming has taken various forms and is communicated across different contexts and modalities either verbal or nonverbal. Yet, studies and publications on the existing and increasing connection between authoritarian populism and securitisation have primarily focused on the verbal and the written (Bonansinga 2021; Homolar and Scholz 2019; Kinnvall 2014; Kinnvall 2019; van Rythoven 2015; Wojczewski 2020). Research examining this intersection from a visual and multimodal perspective is relatively limited (Jaramillo-Dent, Contreras-Pulido, and Pérez-Rodríguez 2022). Thus, there is a growing need to include visual and multimodal analysis into the investigation of securitisation in authoritarian populist communication. Images have the power to stimulate emotions and may generate the formation of certain attitudes and behaviours. According to Lilleker, populists use visuals to generate “strong emotional reactions and so further their cause” (2019, 47). Considering these arguments, this paper seeks to contribute to the study of visual securitisation by exploring its multimodal representations in the discourse of both authoritarian populist and mainstream right parties and the different semiotic strategies used to display threat and security.

This study aims to address these questions by looking at the case of the Sweden Democrats (SD). The authoritarian populist party is known for its opposition to immigration and has carried a public rhetoric representing immigrants as the main source of criminal acts and social insecurity (Kinnvall and Nesbitt-Larking 2010; Mulinari and Neergaard 2014; Rydgren 2008). Like other European authoritarian populist parties, the SD has encountered an unprecedented electoral gain. This achievement is the result of a rebranding strategy (Elgenius and Rydgren 2019) to attract a broader base, leading scholars to re-categorise the Sweden Democrats and define it as a moderated extremist party (Mudde 2019). Using multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) through the lens of visual securitisation framework (Hansen 2011), this paper is, therefore, interested in analysing and exploring (RQ1) how the Sweden Democrats engage visually with (in)security themes and present securitisation on Instagram, (RQ2) which semiotic strategies are employed to display security issues and (RQ3) how different/similar they are from those used by the major right mainstream party in Sweden?

The article is structured into five parts. The first section presents a literature review discussing the characteristics of authoritarian populist discourse and (visual) securitisation. In the second part, I provide a brief description of the context of the study. The third section explains the method, describes the material and analytical procedure. The fourth part includes the results and offers an overview of the contents of the analysed Instagram posts. In the final section, I discuss the findings in the light of previous research.

Securitisation as an authoritarian populist pledge

A growing number of research in security studies, international relations, political science and more recently in communication and discourse studies have demonstrated the existing and still expanding connection between populism, politics of fear and security (Lazaridis and Konsta 2015a; Lazaridis and Tsagkroni 2015b; Wodak 2015; Homolar and Scholz 2019; Steele and Homolar 2019; Kinnvall 2019; Kurylo 2022). Earlier work by Laclau (2005) has even described the populist movement as both a reaction to and manifestation of security threats. Considered as a thin-centred ideology (Mudde 2004), populism has been associated with different set of political beliefs (left-wing, right-wing). However, it is when it is combined with authoritarian values that the topic of security becomes a central element in the populist discourse (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). This paves the way for authoritarian policies and measures to be discursively introduced with the claim of preserving the conformity and safety of the native people (Mudde 2019, Norris & Inglehart, 2019). In authoritarian populist discourses, crises and narratives of insecurity are commonly used to diffuse a feeling of loss and fear among the public (Homolar and Scholz 2019), demonise the political establishment and scapegoat the outgroup – primarily newcomers and immigrants – (Block and Negrine 2017). By adopting these aspects of politics of fear, authoritarian populist parties intend to achieve two goals. First, they depict and frame the elite and foreigners as a security menace to the people (Wojczewski 2020) and thus raise sentiment of threat and insecurity which leads to “create a special sphere of ‘safe ours’ and ‘dangerous theirs’” (Palu 2011, 161). Second, they picture themselves as important “securitising actors” (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998) with the power to articulate security issues and protect the in-group against ontological threats (Kinnvall 2019; Kurylo 2022; Wojczewski 2020). This process is known as securitisation and best understood as

an articulated assemblage of practices whereby heuristic artefacts (metaphors, policy tools, image repertoires, analogies, stereotypes, emotions, etc.) are contextually mobilized by a securitizing actor, who works to prompt an audience to build a coherent network of implications (…) about the critical vulnerability of a referent object (…) (Balzacq 2010, 3)

Securitisation reflects then the mechanism used by authoritarian populist parties to generate fear and legitimise their appeals to more security measures (Wodak 2015). They go even further by making securitisation a populist pledge or as Huysmans describes as “a political currency” which provides the authoritarian populist parties with the political authority to transform a political issue into a security matter (2005, 52). This is mostly materialised on a discursive level. In fact, securitisation is a discursive practice (Wojczewski 2020) performed in distinguishing aspects when it is carried out by populist actors. In her paper, Kurylo (2022) argues that populist actors have a distinctive securitising style compared to the one used by traditional security institutions (governmental elites, army, police, intelligence agencies, etc.). She broke down the attributes of populist securitisation into two main categories: discourse and aesthetic. This categorisation shares aspects of the discursive-performative approach in which populism is regarded as a form of discourse, performance and political style (Laclau 2005; Moffitt 2016; Ostiguy 2017). On a discursive level, populist actors appear to embrace: (1) an anti-elitist security rhetoric distrusting the authority of the establishment and all the institutions related to it, including mainstream media; (2) a status of political outsider that supposedly enables them to claim the authority to securitise the people and represent the popular will; (3) a close rapport with the audience by nurturing “an imaginary intimate actor-audience bond, which allows the actor to understand the people as oneself” (Kurylo 2022, 10). And finally (4) an active participation of the audience by considering their public – the people – an important agent in the securitisation process (Côté 2016) who has the readiness to adhere or disregard the populist securitising measures (Kurylo 2022).

On the aesthetic dimension, populist securitisation is characterised by a sense of commonness and kitschiness (Jordan 2013) far from the rationality and expertise of the traditional security institutions. This is comparable to what Moffitt has called “bad manners” which can take place through “political incorrectness” (2016, 58). It is also argued that populist securitising style usually takes form in affective shows with strong emotional appeals (Kurylo 2022) leading ultimately to an oversimplification of complex security issues (Arditi 2007). In her analogical words, Kurylo offers a rundown and describes populist securitising performances as “easily digestible, visually arresting and thrilling in their tendency to say the unsayable” (2022, 15). This conceptualisation of populism as a particular style of securitisation embodies a performative aspect in which the modes of communication can vary from verbal to non-verbal (Kurylo 2022).

Visual securitisation: when images speak security

Each of the arguments presented above hone in on the presence of a distinctive securitising style displayed by populist actors, including authoritarian ones. This begs the question: how visually different and exclusive this discursive style can be from other political rhetorics.

It is argued that visuals have a far-reaching impact than verbal messages since they have the ability to go beyond the limits of language (Barthes 1963). Also, their ability to circulate through various channels makes them more effective in communicating political messages. Several scholars have acknowledged the political power of visuals and their impact on political behaviours (Grabe and Bucy 2009; Schill 2012; Anastasia et al. 2019). More importantly, they are suitable for spreading fear and threat (Altheide 2019). In fact, the representation of fear, threat and (in)security can have even more impact when they are visually translated, as demonstrated by a study of Matthes and Schmuck (2017). Through a survey-experiment, they examined how anti-immigration attitudes are formed and explored the role of visuals in generating these effects. The study highlights the significant impact produced by images compared to the use of words. Their findings suggest strong effect of visuals in increasing anti-immigration attitudes among citizens across all education levels.

This capacity and power of visual imagery to speak (in)security and disseminate fear is known as “visual securitisation.” The term has been used interchangeably by scholars in the fields of security studies, international politics, and visual studies to denote “the discursive processes by which images are assigned security implications” (Kearns 2017, 491). Other definitions of visual securitisation have emerged over time as mediated communication became more visually centred. One definition of visual securitisation that is more comprehensive and which this paper will adopt for the discussion to come, is that of Hansen: “when images constitute something, or someone as threatened and in need of immediate defence or when securitizing actors argue that images ‘speak security’” (2011, 51). She suggests that visual securitisation can be analysed through four elements: the image itself; the strategies of depiction it employs; the immediate context and genre of its publication and the wider policy discourse. Hansen’s approach grants a significant importance to the visual’s features, for instance: ambiguity (the ability to be read differently due to its polysemic nature). Not only is it important to consider this specific characteristic but also the various strategies of security depiction used: demonisation (portraying the Other as demoniac and thus menacing), belittling (representation of weakness and cowardness) and suffering (picturing someone as afflicted and thus threatened). These components represent an important aspect that is particularly pertinent to the aim of the current study. By examining how images are interconnected to other visual codes (inter-visuality) and textual settings (intertextuality), Hansen’s approach (2011) promises a comprehensive insight into the role of visuality in analysing different security discourses and styles including the securitisation in the populist fashion.

Sweden as a context

In the early 2000s, while most of the European countries saw a quickly rising populist radical right tide, Sweden stood as a deviant case and a well-shielded place against the rampant electoral success of right-wing populism (Rydgren and van der Meiden 2019). However, this exceptionalism ended in 2010 when the Sweden Democrats (SD) entered the national parliament. Since then, the authoritarian populist party has consolidated its electoral gains and strengthened its position to become the country’s third-biggest party in 2014 (Widfeldt 2018). But it is in the 2022 Sweden’s General Elections that SD achieved a major breakthrough by expanding its vote share to 20.5% and turning into the second largest party in Sweden. This position has guaranteed SD a say in the government programme – a first in the party’s history – in exchange for their parliamentary support to the ruling coalition (Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals).

This shift from the periphery of the Swedish political landscape to its core is the result of long and constant efforts to revamp the reputation of SD by distancing itself from its problematic background since the party sheltered, in its early years, several controversial figures and individuals with criminal records, fascist and Nazi backgrounds (Widfeldt 2018). It was also achieved by embracing a less extremist ideology towards immigration following a makeover approach that includes constructing a master frame that excludes “the stigmatisation of previous elements of biological racism, anti-Semitism or antidemocratic critique” (Elgenius and Rydgren 2019, 568).

Material

The authoritarian populist securitisation and its discursive characteristics can be explored following a comparative approach by examining how populist radical right parties display visual securitisation in contrast to mainstream/non populist parties through their communication channels. For this study, the data were drawn from Instagram. The choice of this social network is related to three considerations. First, Instagram is explicitly framed around the visual and known for being an image-centred platform. Second, it has not seen enough academic attention since most of the research on political parties and electoral campaigns is largely directed towards Facebook and Twitter (Olof Larsson 2023). Finally, and more importantly, Instagram is rising as a strong tool for political communication and increasingly used by populist actors (Olof Larsson 2023).

As this paper focuses on SD’s performance during the 2022 election campaign, an automated data collection was conducted to gather Instagram posts over a four weeks period leading up to the election date (9 August 2022–10 September 2022). The data-gathering process compiled not only Instagram postings from the official account of SD, but also the other seven parties represented in the Swedish parliament (Social Democrats, Left Party, Centre Party, Green Party, Moderate Party, Christian Democrats, Liberals).¹ The initial number of posts gathered during the studied period was 1108 posts.

The data collected was characterised by a diversified visual and textual content (image, video, captions, etc.). For the current study, only still pictures were selected. Each static image was sampled as a single post (including the ones that are part of a multiple pictures post). Furthermore, videos were excluded to ensure uniformity of comparison and analysis. The posts selected (N = 639) were then screen-captured and manually stored.

Method and analytical procedure

A large number of the Instagram posts collected for the current study are of multimodal nature. Such content entails the use of a multimodal approach, and more specifically the multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA). This method provides broader contexts to interpret the meaning of visuals but also the actual relationship between the verbal and the visual through the notions of denotation/connotation (Barthes 1963) – and how they interact in a concrete way. Exploring multimodal discourse thus implies looking at the semiotic choices and how they are employed to create meanings (Machin 2013; 2016). In the current study, using MCDA allows identifying what type of actors, actions, and events are suppressed, highlighted, and abstracted (Machin 2013). This approach also shows how these processes occur in a visual discourse.

Drawing from the work of Halliday on visual social semiotics (1978), Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) suggested a framework that categorises the three functions of visuals as representational, interactive and compositional. Together, these levels compose the ideological purposes of the image. The representational function focuses on the participants (people, places, objects), actions depicted and how they visually relate to each other. The interactive level is concerned with the production and reception of the visual by looking at the relationship between the creator of the image, the characters in it and its viewer. The third function of a picture, compositional, covers the layout, the position of different textual and visual elements in the image and their salience.

In practice, the analytical grid of this study is based on two stages: a thematic classification and MCDA. I initiated the examination of the material by first going through the selected posts and getting acquainted with their content. During this first round of analysis, I generated initial notes describing the main topic in each post (crime, economy, immigration, etc.) and then started conducting an initial categorisation of the main content and topics by looking at recurrent social issues and concepts in the pictures using their accompanying captions as source of contextual information and background.

Following the first stage of analysis, several themes were identified in the visual content of the Instagram posts by the eight parties studied. These themes include crime, immigration, inflation, environment, education, and healthcare. For the second stage of investigation, only posts that comprise topics of crime and immigration were considered. This topical choice derives from the fact that themes of crime, law, order and immigration topped the 2022 electoral campaign over other issues such as environment, inflation, economy, and pandemic (Ekengren Oscarsson et al. 2022). According to Aylott and Bolin, law and order was considerably an important matter in the choice of half the exit poll’s respondents. It was also “the top or second-top issue for those who voted for a right-bloc party” (2023, 1057).

To understand the characteristics of the securitising discourse of SD, the second phase of investigation focuses and compares the authoritarian populist party to the Moderates as the latter represents the major mainstream right party in Sweden (Jupskås 2021). This second stage of analysis – based on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s framework – consisted of examining the three functions in each post by exploring: (1) the representation of social actors and transitivity² in both visual and verbal elements, (2) the compositional choices in terms of salience, internal flow and framing, and finally (3) the interactive purposes or how viewers are positioned in regards to participants inside the image (e.g. contact, distance and point of view). Given that investigating the representation of social actors is critical in the process of unveiling the discourses (Billig 1995; Wodak, Cillia, and Reisigl 1999; Wodak and Weiss 2005), the analysis focused primarily on examining the depiction of social participants, their actions and the compositional and interactive devices that surrounded them.

As the material combines verbal and visual contents, a third level of analysis was included. It focused on the inter-semiotic relation between the image and text (Martinec and Salway 2005). This connection was studied by identifying the type of relative status of text and image, and the logico-semantic relationship between the two elements (van Leeuwen 2011). With the aim of exploring the way in which SD communicates visual securitisation in comparison with the conservative party the Moderates, the above-listed analyses were combined at a final stage to provide detailed insights into how actors and their actions are represented, visually composed, and interact with the audience in order to construct a securitising message.

Results

The first stage of analysis showed that the themes of crime and immigration were both used by five parties out of the eight studied. While the content on the topic of crime, law and order was common in the Instagram posts of all the parties from the right-wing bloc – the Sweden Democrats, Moderate Party, Christian Democrats and Liberal Party-, the Social Democrats were the only party from the “red greens” coalition (Aylott and Bolin 2023) whose postings addressed this topic (see Table 1). As for the immigration theme, it was actively employed by SD and to a lesser degree by the other parties of the right-wing bloc. The results of the thematic analysis also revealed that the Sweden Democrats and Moderate party shared, on their accounts, visuals in which the content revolved around both crime and immigration. These posts relate insecurity and criminality to foreign nationals in Sweden (RQ1). These findings mirror the ownership of crime and immigration issues by both the Sweden Democrats and the mainstream right party the Moderates during the 2022 electoral campaign (Aylott and Bolin 2023).

Table 1. Themes of crime and immigration in Instagram posts of Swedish political parties during the 2022 electoral campaign.

Party	Posts on crime	Posts on immigration	Posts on both crime & immigration
Sweden Democrats (N = 116)	11	17	13
Moderate Party (N = 143)	18	7	9
Liberal Party (N = 66)	7	1	2
Christian Democrats (N = 50)	4	1	0
Social Democrats (N = 127)	9	0	0
Centre Party (N = 60)	0	0	0
Left Party (N = 26)	0	0	0
Green Party (N = 51)	0	0	0
Total (N = 639)	49	26	24

In the following subsections, I present the main characteristics of the visual form in SD’s Instagram posts before identifying the party’s semiotic choices by introducing a deeper and more detailed analysis for both topics on crime and immigration (RQ2). To come to a better understanding of the party’s securitising style, I also introduce the results of the comparative analysis of SD and the Moderates which also share content on the two topics mentioned above (RQ3). Examples of the Instagram posts are displayed to accompany the analysis.

The semiotic strategies of the Sweden democrats

In the Instagram posts, the most common form of visualisation is campaign posters. They usually include different textual (quote, bullet points, figures, and percentages), graphic (line graphs and party’s logo) and visual (photographs and portraits) elements. The Sweden Democrats (SD) also use photomontages, screenshots of news website pages (Samnytt³, Expressen⁴) to primarily re-contextualise facts and events to convey the idea of insecurity.

In terms of content, the Instagram posts portray several social actors and their actions. Looking into these representations is fundamental in the process of unveiling the discourses (Billig 1995; Wodak, Cillia, and Reisigl 1999; Wodak and Weiss 2005). From MCDA approach, the authoritarian populist party presents the concepts of threat and insecurity around seven social participants who are associated linguistically and semiotically to specific actions and therefore illustrated through different strategies.

Dehumanisation

The textual representation of the first social actor is achieved using collective nouns such as “Kriminella” (Criminals), “gängen” (gangs) “terrorister” (terrorists) and “IS-återvändare” (IS returnees). The actor is then depicted as an assimilated group (Van Leuween, 2008). By adopting collectivisation and impersonalisation as representational strategies, SD erases any individual aspect and personal details with the purpose to dehumanise the social participant (Machin and Mayr 2012). This representation is emphasised by the type of actions associated with the participant which are mostly active material processes “attack” (attack), “bränna” (burn) and “skjutning” (shooting) with the police and Swedish citizens being the goals of those acts. In addition, the social participant is portrayed as a threatening group who is out of control and behaves disruptively by carrying out the act of “härjar fritt” (ravage freely). This representation constitutes the social actor as a referent subject; the menacing entity (Balzacq, Léonard, and Ruzicka 2016).

The visual representation highlights even more the negative conceptualisation carried throughout the text. The notion of threat and insecurity is accentuated via images in which the social actor is represented as a violent crowd and group of rioters (see Figure 1). The picture shows a mass of people not individually distinguishable. We can argue that this representation aims to depict the social group as homogenous and create a “they are all the same” impression (Ledin and Machin 2020, 55). In addition, the choice of a wide long shot cancels any physical proximity or intimacy with the social actor and suggests instead an impersonal relationship (2020). The word “Korankravallerna” (Quran riots) contextualises the visual presentation by adding circumstantial elements. The post referred to the riots that had shaken several Swedish cities in April 2022 and were sparked by a far-right group’s plan to burn copies of the Quran. The picture captured the moment cars were set on fire by rioters. By including specific location and time in the visual representation, SD connect the social actor to immigrants and Swedish citizens with foreign heritage. Ideologically, this representation is very powerful as it implies that criminals have an immigrant background. This is pointedly showcased in Figures 2 and 3. The two posts each comprise a screenshot sequence from an SVT⁵ news report on the reasons behind SD “owning” the issue of crime, law and order. In these posts, the authoritarian populist party uses intervisuality (the two pictures are dependent on each other) but more importantly the concept of recontextualisation (van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999). Through a process of deletion of settings, addition and substitution, SD conveys the statement from the news report in a new different context allowing the party to legitimise its claim that crime and immigration are the two sides of the same coin.

Figure 1. Posted 30 August 2022.⁸

Figure 2. Posted 22 August 2022.⁹

Figure 3. Posted 22 August 2022.¹⁰

To emphasise further this linkage, the authoritarian populist party adopts the strategy of categorisation and personalisation in Figure 4. The picture demonstrates the biological and cultural features of the represented participant. The Instagram post, which is a screenshot of a news website, displays the mugshots of three brown skinned, dark haired and heavy bearded young men. This categorisation explicitly points out the origin of the represented actors and refers to the social group they belong to. It mirrors the stereotype of “the dark-haired and dark-skinned Muslim immigrant man featured as criminal, sexually violent, aggressive and non-integrated” (Gokieli 2017, 271). They are also visually represented as being active. Picturing a social actor as an active agent generally refers to a positive representation (Machin and Mayer 2012) unless the participant is from a specific social group. For instance, van Dijk (2000) demonstrated that ethnic minorities are only represented in active roles when they are associated with wrong-doing and negative actions.

Figure 4. Posted 24 August 2022.¹¹

In Instagram posts with content on immigration, a related social actor is introduced under the collective noun of “illegala utlänningar” (illegal aliens) and the process noun of “invandrigen” (immigration). Collectivisation and nominalisation similarly are backgrounding strategies that aim to exclude or suppress the social actor (Van Leuween 2008). Looking at the transitivity dimension, the represented participant is linked to processes and terms that connote money and spending:

Regeringen lägger 130 miljarder SEK per år på invandring

(The government spends SEK 130 billion per year on immigration)

Asylinvandringen kostar 130 miljarder SEK per år

(The asylum immigration costs SEK 130 billion per year)

This profusion of specific terms and their equivalents is known as “overlexicalization” (Fowler et al. 1979). Teo describes this concept as the outcome of “when a surfeit of repetitious, quasi-synonymous terms is woven into the fabric of news discourse, giving rise to a sense of overcompleteness” (2000, 20). Overlexicalisation can be used as a persuasive strategy “to disfavour or even derogate” a social actor (Teo 2000). In other contexts, it can also suggest that the participant or his actions are “problematic of ideological contention” (Machin and Mayer 2012, 37). Here, immigrants are presented as an economic threat burdening the Swedish welfare system.

Visually, the social actor is referred to through a cultural attribute: the headscarf (Van Leeuwen 2001). In Figure 5, the close shot makes the headwear distinctly more salient than the woman's individual features. This “object sign” (Barthes 1963) plays the role of denotative signifier of the participant. It implies that the social actor belongs to a social type with a specific religious background and therefore emphasises on its typification and aspect as an out-group.

Figure 5. Posted 25 August 2022.¹²

Victimisation

In the category of crime and order, one participant is represented through collective nouns and in an impersonalised form (“Police,” “police officers”). It can be argued that the aim behind this referential choice is to foreground the police as a whole institution not just a specific individual (Machin and Mayer 2012). This social entity and those who belong to it are yet referred to in a passive form. Verbs position them as receivers: they were “bitna” (bitten) and “spottade på” (spat on). It is represented as the target of the criminals and gangs actions (see Figure 6). Although it is a negative referential aspect, it is usually associated with the strategy of victimisation in order to generate sympathy from the reader/viewer. Police officers are represented as completely passive and therefore, we might argue, in need of help and re-valorisation. This is used as an argumentative structure in several posts allowing Sweden Democrats to call for actions and propose solutions.

This passivation of the social actor is also reflected visually through anonymisation (back profile portraits and blurred⁶ pictures). In some Instagram posts, the police are represented through “objects sign” that denotatively symbolise the institution (uniforms, police cars lined up, and barricade tape). According to Kress and Van Leeuwen, the suppression or anonymisation of the social actor is the “visual analogue” of “passive agent deletion” (2006, 64).

The same strategy is employed to depict another participant, those who are victims of criminal acts. They are visually absent from the pictures. This non-representation corresponds to a visual exclusion or suppression of the social actor to create or preserve anonymity (Ledin and Machin 2020). On the linguistic level, the participant is portrayed as passivated: “skjuten” (shot), “skadad” (injured), “attackerad” (attacked). He is therefore pictured powerless, helpless, and threatened. These referential and predicational strategies (Wodak 2001) involve other linguistic approaches such as individualisation: using descriptives and biological categorisation: “Kvinna” (Woman), “liten pojke” (little boy), “en minderåriga flickan” (a minor girl). These details contribute further to victimising and humanising the participant (Machin and Mayer 2012) and thus spawn feelings of sympathy and compassion. Through this representation, this social actor is depicted as the object of securitisation; the referent object (Balzacq 2005). Furthermore, this social participant is also associated with actions (“concern”) related to mental processes. These verbs serve to express sensations and reactions. By representing the participants as a subject of mental processes, the audience is invited to consider them as “reflectors of action” and therefore trigger their empathy with the represented social actors (Machin and Mayer 2012).

Delegitimisation

The fifth social actor present in the Instagram postings of SD is the Social Democrats. The party is represented using collectivisation and nomination. In some posts, it is referred to as a collective group “sossar” and “sossarna.” This name is usually employed as a derogatory and informal label towards the party. In other pictures, Social Democrats is represented through its leader and then prime-minister Magdalena Andersson. The head of the party and the government is presented without the use of functionalisation or honorifics. In Figure 6, she is presented bluntly as “Magdalena” without her last name. According to Van Leeuwen (2008), functionalisation happens “when social actors are referred to in terms of an activity, in terms of something they do, for instance, an occupation or role” (2008, 42). Therefore, the choice of the nomination strategy over functionalisation might be a strategic approach to de-legitimise Magdalena Anderson and remove any level of seniority or a position that involves a degree of respect (Machin and Mayer 2012). This also introduces an anti-government/anti-elitist stand which characterises the populist securitising style. In terms of transitivity, the analysis reveals that Social Democrats and Magdalena Andersson are represented as carrying out material processes or processes of doing with concrete result and outcome (Van Leeuwen 1996):

“Sossarna lät kriminaliteten öka” (“Sossarna” allowed crime to increase)

“Sossarna valde invandring före allt annat”

(“Sossarna” chose immigration before anything else)

In these processes, the focus is on the actor and the nature of the action. The party is pictured as responsible through its inaction and complicity. It is also represented as favouring the immigrants over the Swedish citizens. The Social Democrats are pictured as blameable and accountable for the prevailing insecurity and mass immigration in the country.

While Social Democrats are represented linguistically, they are scarcely referred to visually. This amounts to visual suppression and a removal of the role of the social actor in the image. There is a sense that it is not so much the party itself that is important but its policies and their consequences. In the posts in which the Social Democrats is mentioned, the visual salience is given to the outcome of their actions through a sense of insecurity with the deployment of police cars (see Figures 6 and 7). These representational strategies serve to responsibilise, delegitimise and belittle the Social Democrats in order to demonstrate their unworthiness to occupy the country’s top political positions.

Figure 6. Posted 31 August 2022.¹³

Figure 7. Posted 24 August 2022.¹⁴

Legitimisation

In contrast, the Sweden Democrats introduce them-selves as the political solution to face the crime and mass immigration and engage in a process of legitimisation. As Chilton explains, legitimisation revolves around “manifesting itself in acts of self-praise, self-apology, self-explanation, selfjustification, self-identification as a source of authority, reason, vision and sanity” (2004, 47). In this regard, the Sweden Democrats is collectivised as “SD” or using the pronoun “vi” (we). This pronoun is employed to unite the speaker/text producer and his audience around or against specific beliefs and notions (Machin and Mayer, 2012) and therefore generates a sense of collective “us” in opposition to a collective “them” (Oktar 2001). However, the party is mainly represented through one individual: Jimmie Åkesson. This representation embodies one of the important aspects of populist parties: the centrality of the leader (Moffitt 2016; Jacobs and Spierings 2019). On the linguistic level, Jimmie Åkesson is functionalised through his occupation as “leader of the party” which suggests the legitimacy of the actor. In some posts, the participant is referred to as “Jimmie.” Unlike the case of Magdalena Anderson, here the use of the first name of the party leader connotes a sense of familiarity and creates a personal connection with the audience. This closeness is also implied visually through the distance, the point of view, the attire and body language. In Figure 8, Jimmie Åkesson is presented in a medium shot from a frontal angle which evokes involvement and intimacy. He is wearing a white shirt with rolled up sleeves. This outfit denotes informality, speaking the truth and readiness for taking actions. His facial expressions communicate inner thoughts and suggest that the party leader is engaged in a mental process. He is also visually captured in verbal processes (speaking) with hand gestures conveying a sense of power and strong persuasion. The same message is disseminated linguistically through two types of processes: semiotic and material. The semiotic action is a speech act delivered in a form of quote (Way 2021) which is “reserved for high status actors” (Van Leeuwen 1995, 91). As for the material process, they demonstrate SD as an active participant:

“SD kommer krossa den” (SD will crush it)⁷

“Vi sätter Sverige först och stoppar detta” (We put Sweden first and stop this)

This type of actor is known for his ability to take “action, for making things happen, for controlling others and so forth” (Fairclough 2003, 150). This positive representation is an analogue of power (2003). SD is then conceptualised as a powerful securitising actor who is willing to “crush” and stop criminality and mass immigration by providing strong measures to achieve this goal.

Figure 8. Posted 16 August 2022.¹⁵

The seventh social participant is the audience. It is represented as “you” and frequently addressed through the imperative mood: “ge henne sparken” (fire her), “höj” (raise), “dubbla” (double). We find similar sentence structure in the content on immigration: “Satsa på svenska medborgare istället” (Support Swedish citizens instead), “Förbjud” (Prohibit). This grammatical form expresses the will to influence the behaviour of the audience and is employed to give command and introduce a sense of authority (Machin and Mayer, 2012). This extensive use of imperative form suggests that SD is attempting a “securitizing move” (Balzacq, Léonard, and Ruzicka 2016) through “a call for action,” a call to vote for them.

In addition to the representational strategies applied by SD, the analysis of compositional and interactive choices reveal that the linguistic elements enhance the visual by adding more circumstantial details (Van Leeuwen 2020). This is called an exemplification relation and shows that the image is more general than/without the text.

Given the type of representational strategies the Sweden Democrats employ in their Instagram posts, I will focus in the next section on comparing these referential approaches to those used by the Moderate party. The following paragraphs present the results of this comparison.

The semiotic strategies of the Moderate party

In terms of form, the Moderate party (M) uses “text-based visuals” and “text only” (Farkas et al. 2022). The visual component comprises the predominance of portraits while the textual aspect includes quotes, bullet points and screenshots of tweets from the party’s members accounts. In contrast to SD, the use of photomontages and screen-captures of news websites is entirely absent. Farkas et al. (2022) have previously demonstrated that populist actors tend to use montage more often than their non-populist counterparts. As for the content, the Moderates adopt to some extent similar compositional choices as the ones used by SD. While they embrace comparable representational approaches towards certain social actors, they engage in different referential and interactive strategies towards other participants.

On the linguistic level, one of the social participants is portrayed as an assimilated group (van Leeuwen 2008) through collectivisation and impersonalisation. This representation is achieved via collective and process nouns: “Kriminella” (criminals), “IS terrorister” (IS terrorist), “gängen” (gangs) and “kriminaliteten” (crime). In some posts, it is referred to as “utländska medborgare” (foreign nationals). This representational choice links the social participant to immigration and follows the same approach of SD. Overall, this strategy, as argued previously, aims at removing any human aspect and cancelling the sympathy of the audience. It is also transcribed visually with the suppression of the participant from the pictures. This negative representation suggests that a certain type of actions is related to the participant. However, he is not usually depicted as an active actor as it is displayed in SD’s posts. Although the social participant is part of material verb processes, he is still not the performer of the action but rather the goal. In other terms, he is the participant at whom the action is directed, also referred to as the “dons-tos” (Machin and Mayer 2012) as demonstrated in the following sentence: “Utvisa fler utländska medborgare som begår brott” (Expel more foreign nationals who commit crimes).

A further interesting finding is the use of modality as a linguistic tool to express the attitude of M towards certain propositions that involve the above-mentioned social participant. In the following sentence, the social participant is associated with modalities of obligation such as “should”: “IS terrorister ska sitta inlåsta i fängelse” (IS terrorists should be locked up in prison). From a CDA perspective, modality allows showing the text producer’s stance and belief in the statement being given. In this case, the Moderates communicate a sense of obligation, necessity, and emergency in performing the actions and implementing the accompanied measures.

Consequently, M is portrayed as an active social actor. It is mostly represented through its leader Ulf Kristensson but also other members of the party. The latters are functionalised and referred to by their occupation in order to ensure the legitimacy of their quotes and statements as demonstrated in Figure 9. This representational choice is distinctive from the one opted by SD which visually focuses on the centrality of its leader, a key characteristic of the populist communication. Also on the visual dimension, Ulf Kristensson and the party members are showing the formality of political attire (see Figures 9 and 10). In addition, the “sharp” gaze and the posture connote a mental process that revolves around expressing seriousness and firmness proving their ability to govern.

Figure 9. Posted 15 August 2022.¹⁶

Figure 10. Posted 23 August 2022.¹⁷

Another noteworthy finding is the use of imperative mode while addressing the audience. The Moderates, similarly to SD, adopt the same representational approach towards the public. It is referred to by employing the pronoun “you” and verbs in the imperative form: “Avskaffa” (Get rid), “Genomför” (Implement), “Skärp” (Toughen). These are all material verb processes in which the actor (you) is urged to act by voting for M. This appeal is visually translated, in Figures 9 and 10, with “demand pictures” (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). These types of images create an imagined relation between the viewer and the participants inside the visual. In the words of Jewitt and Oyama, “the people in the picture symbolically demand something from the viewer. Facial expression and gestures then fill in what exactly they ‘demand’ in this way” (2004, 145).

Similarly to SD, the Moderates depict the Social Democrats as “misslyckades” (having failed) to stop the rise of criminality and the police is referred to as a victim of criminal acts: “att kasta sten på poliser” (to throw stones at police officers), but they are also represented as a courageous and valiant entity that needs to be supported and valued (see Figure 11). This approach is coupled with a visual representation that preserves the anonymity of the police officers (back profile picture) but focuses on their biological attributes. In Figure 11, we see two standing police officers (a man and woman). They are on duty as they are wearing their uniforms. The medium shot connotes a sense of social relationship but, more importantly, allows a glimpse at the biological characteristics of the policewoman (the blond hair). This suggests a strategy of categorisation and identification (Van Leeuwen 2008) and implies that the police officer is “Swedish” in contrast with the biological and cultural classification of immigrants and criminals in SD’s posts.

Figure 11. Posted 25 August 2022.¹⁸

Concluding discussion

Through a focus on the representation of social actors and actions in the Instagram posts of the Sweden Democrats and the Moderate party, the aim of this paper was to explore the visual securitisation in authoritarian populist discourse and examine whether this securitising style is distinct from the one adopted by mainstream right actors on Instagram.

To answer the research questions, a combination of thematic analysis and multimodal critical discourse analysis was applied to identify different semiotic strategies employed to represent social participants and therefore unveil the discourses articulated via each mode of communication (Way 2021). This analytical approach has led to one of the central findings of the study which is that the Sweden Democrats embrace a visual securitising discourse centred around three components: (1) the use of specific strategies of security depiction, (2) embracing a populist style, and (3) reliance on the text to counterbalance the ambiguity of the image. By strategically employing these discursive approaches, the authoritarian populist party furnishes its Instagram posts with a securitising potential that exploits politics of fear and notion of urgency (Wodak 2015; Wojczewski 2020) in order to raise the issues of crime and immigration as security matters.

One component of SD’s visual securitisation includes the different representational strategies used to illustrate the identities of Us and Them as threatened and threatening (Hansen 2011). The first depiction revolves around dehumanising immigrants and foreign nationals by associating them with crime and criminality. This is in line with what Hansen described as a strategy of demonisation which consists of picturing the other as “demonic, barbaric, evil, and menacing” (2011, 59). This representation is highly present in the traditional fashion of security discourse and mostly connected to the concept of threatening referent subject (Balzacq, Léonard, and Ruzicka 2016). The second strategy embodies the portrayal of the Swedish citizens and the police as victims of crime and immigration conceptualising them as presumed referent objects of security (Wojczewski 2020). According to Hansen (2011), this visual depiction of suffering has usually the power of producing a call for the securitisation of the threatened referent objects. The representation of the police as a menaced entity provides this securitising appeal with further gravity and severity. In addition, the backgrounding approach adopted by SD through the use of passivation, both visually and linguistically, insinuating a victim-perpetrator relationship can have a far-reaching ideological significance. It serves as an argumentative technique in xenophobic discourses (Wodak 1996; van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999) and “belongs to the necessary toolkit of right-wing populist rhetoric” (Wodak 2015, 14). It is therefore an unequivocal expression of the authoritarian populist ideology which praises the exclusion of the vilified others, among them immigrants and minorities. In fact, another characteristic of SD’s visual securitising style is its populist aspect. This manifests itself in an anti-elitist security rhetoric (Kurylo 2022) that delegitimises the ruling party, Social Democrats, and enumerates its failures in tackling the issue of crime and immigration. This approach not only aims at generating a sentiment of distrust and challenging the authority of the government (2022), but also represents Social democrats with weakness and cowardice attributes which refer to another strategy of security depiction known as the strategy of belittling (Hansen 2011). By downgrading and criticising the ruling party, SD stage themselves inherently as a political outsider concerned with the protection of the “heartland” (Taggart 2004). This position allows them to acquire and claim discursively the authority to securitise (Kurylo 2022).

Another populist securitising feature is the creation of a familiar and intimate bond with the audience (Ekman and Widholm 2017; Kurylo 2022). SD achieved this through the visual representation of their leader. The interactive strategies chosen to picture Jimmie Åkesson (close/medium shots and frontal angle) have the purpose of establishing an imaginary connection between him (the securitising actor) and the audience. By forging this bond, the Sweden Democrats aspire to win the public’s endorsement of the party’s securitising measures. Therefore, the role of the audience goes beyond the spectator stand. As demonstrated in the analysis, SD addresses the audience with imperative form transforming the public from a passive viewer to a potential active participant in the securitisation process.

Beyond the content, the populist aspect of SD’ securitising discourse takes aesthetic proportions through eye-catching colours, striking photomontages and graphic elements. It also embraces colloquialism (i.e. everyday language) which reminds the sense of commonness that characterises the populist securitising style (Kurylo 2022).

The last characteristic of Sweden Democrats’ visual securitising discourse is articulated through the nature of interplay between visual and verbal modes. The authoritarian populist party relies on the linguistic elements in the visuals to articulate their securitising message. The textual components reduce the general and ambiguous aspect of the visual by adding more circumstantial details (Van Leeuwen 2020). However, does the ambiguity of the image lessen its rhetorical securitising power? Hansen grappled with the same question and argued that the ambiguity of visuals is what might actually turn them into “such strong candidates for securitization” (2011, 58). In sum, the combination of verbal and visual modes lends strength to the Sweden Democrats’ securitising message. While the visual aspect generates a strong affective relation with the viewer – sometimes powerful enough to inspire an immediate action, the linguistic elements point out towards the kind of measures (e.g. immediate deportation, stricter border controls, danish sanctions, revokation of citizenship, etc.) that should be applied to face the threats represented (Hansen 2011).

In terms of comparison between the Sweden Democrats and Moderates, it can be argued that their visual securitising discourses share some common features but also demonstrate apparent distinctions. The Moderate party includes some rhetorical aspects peculiar to the securitising populist style such as anti-elitism, the status of political outsider and the audience inclusion in the securitisation process. The incorporation of these populist discursive features into the Moderates’ securitising communication might be explained through the “contagion effect” and “party competition” generated by the success of right-wing populist parties. Previous work from Abou-Chadi and Krause (2020) has revealed the strong influence of the popularity of radical right parties on mainstream right’s behaviour and policy positions. Earlier studies by van Spanje (2010) and Han (2015) have also pointed how the effect of the growing electoral success of the radical right on mainstream parties has led the latter to adopt a more restrictive attitudes and stances regarding immigration and multiculturalism. It can be argued here that the Moderates are embracing, to some extent, Sweden Democrats’ standpoints and communication strategies resulting in the mainstreaming of some aspects of authoritarian populist discourse.

That being said, while the Moderate party focuses on representing themselves as a potential securitising actor, depicting the Social Democrats as responsible of the insecurity in Sweden and picturing the audience as an active participant in solving the problem through the act of voting, they decline in identifying discursively the threatening and threatened groups as bluntly as SD does. In addition to the absence of fundamental strategies of security depiction, the Moderates put less emphasis on the centrality of the leader which is a key element in the populist securitising discourse (Kurylo 2022).

Based on these findings, my study has demonstrated that authoritarian populist actors adopt a visual securitising style that not only includes apparent populist aspects but also is distinct from the discursive style of the mainstream right. By following an interdisciplinary approach, this paper showed how authoritarian populist discourse is articulated in the context of security and how populism as political style manifests itself in multimodal communication. In methodological terms, this study also displayed the potentialities of multimodal critical discourse analysis in examining and revealing the discursive approaches and strategies dissimulated in a combination of verbal and visual modes.

With the growing success of authoritarian populist parties across Western Europe, their securitising discourse might have an even far-reaching impact on policies and societies in the coming years. This study focuses on the case of Sweden and Sweden Democrats but more comparative research is needed to explore how these visual and multimodal discourses are displayed, disseminated and appropriated by other authoritarian populist actors, in different social media platforms, and in different national and cultural contexts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Salma Bouchafra

Salma Bouchafra is a PhD candidate at the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Gothenburg. As a former multimedia broadcast journalist, her research interests fall within the fields of visuals politics, multimodality, and discourse studies. Her research project focuses on populist communication, securitisation, and social representations. It explores the discursive construction of (in)security in authoritarian populist communication on social media.

Notes

1 Instagram posts were collected using an existing library on Apify. Apify is a code-free tool for scraping data from social media platforms including Instagram. The metadata were gathered in an excel file and comprised hashtags, mentions, comments, type of images, likes, locations, and links to open the posts.

2 Transitivity, as explained by Machin and Mayr (2012), is “the study of what people are depicted as doing and refers, broadly, to who does what to whom, and how.” (104)

3 Samnytt (also called Samhällsnytt) is a far-right Swedish alternative news website. It is categorised as far-right “alternative media” by the Swedish Defence Research Agency.

4 Expressen is a Swedish tabloid. It is among the country’s most read newspapers.

5 SVT is a Swedish public service television. It is funded by Swedish residents via the yearly payment of licence fees. (Larsson & Christensen, 2017)

6 The technique of “blurring the background” seeks to produce a visual separation between the subject in the picture and the background. It allows to cancel other elements in the visual and direct the viewer’s attention towards the subject.

7 The word “krossa” (crush) highlighted with salient colours: orange and yellow (See Figure 6).

8 Sweden Democrats. [sverigedemokraterna]. (30 August 2022). “The Coran Riots” [Instagram photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/Ch4WYEhtDH9/?img_index=3

9 Sweden Democrats. [sverigedemokraterna]. (2022, August 22). “SD has also earlier and more clearly than any other party linked gang crime to immigration” [Instagram photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/ChkhxgtL3QH/?img_index=1

10 Sweden Democrats. [sverigedemokraterna]. (22 August 2022). “linked gang crime to immigration.” [Instagram photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/ChkhxgtL3QH/?img_index=1

11 Sweden Democrats. [sverigedemokraterna]. (24 August 2022). “Cheesburgers were missing – then the gang attacked McDonalds staff.” [Instagram photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/Chof4OOAXwj/

12 Sweden Democrats. [sverigedemokraterna]. (25 August 2022). “Did you know that some get SEK 35,000 a month in tax-free contributions?” [Instagram photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/Chrv4KZNN1m/

13 Sweden Democrats. [sverigedemokraterna]. (31 August 2022). “Police officers bitten and spat on during apartment fire. the Soss allowed crime to increase. SD will smash/crush it” [Instagram photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/Ch6qJFItV6F/

14 Sweden Democrats. [sverigedemokraterna]. (24 August 2022). “Shooting for the second night in a row. Magdalena has no answer as to why this is happening. Fire her. SD22” [Instagram photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/Chpu5stoFX0/

15 Sweden Democrats. [sverigedemokraterna]. (7 September 2022). “The gangs roam freely. Don't let Magdalena Andersson get away with failure.” [Instagram photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/ChVKQ9doeJD/

16 The Moderates. [moderaterna]. (15 August 2022). “Introduce Danish penalties for Swedish gangs – stop the revolving doors in prisons” Johan Forssell, legal policy spokesperson. [Instagram photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/ChRoU2kjfvk/

17 The Moderates. [moderaterna]. (23 August 2022). “No one should be lured into becoming a criminal – to take the gang’s money”. [Instagram photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/ChmZuuMs8F9/

18 The Moderates. [moderaterna]. (25 August 2022). “Today is Police day, Heroes deserve to be noticed!”. [Instagram photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/ChrMLMmsSKB/