The social semiotics of Switzerland's far right: how campaign posters by the Swiss National Party communicate across different domains

ABSTRACT

This contribution investigates the campaign posters of the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) in four communication domains: in public space, in the mass media, their impact on other political actors and manipulations of the posters. This approach combines social semiotics, discourse analysis, media linguistics, and linguistic landscaping to present a comprehensive account of the posters’ usage and design. Relying on social semiotics, we first analyze the posters themselves. We then show how the posters are reproduced in journalistic news media which creates a visual framing of the discussion about migration. This framing effect is also evidenced by the fact that many political actors adapt to the SVP’s visual language. Consequently, the discussion about migration increasingly follows the SVP’s logic. In a fourth analytical step, we show how the posters become objects of manipulation that turn them into a place of public debate. We sum up by pointing out the affordances that the posters offer to actors in these different domains.

KEYWORDS:

• Campaign posters
• social semiotics
• mediatization
• affordance
• news coverage
• intertextuality

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 See Luginbühl (2010) for a more detailed account on the party’s history.

2 We refer to a concept of Hall's encoding/decoding model here (Hall 1980, 134). Analyzing texts but not the actual reception processes, does not allow to predict effects of texts. But texts usually entail a “preferred reading” that can be reconstructed by readers – even if readers remain free to reject this reading.

3 We have analysed this poster also in Scarvaglieri and Luginbühl 2020.

4 Its non-verbal character makes it easy to transfer the poster to other contexts, namely by simply exchanging the national flag (see https://www.tagblatt.ch/international/in-chemnitz-haben-sie-es-wieder-getan-wo-rechtsradikale-uberall-zum-svp-schafchen-greifen-ld.1525933).

5 It can be argued that surprising successes like this one are in part due to the party’s campaign posters (Luginbühl 2010; Scarvaglieri 2018).

6 Social Media has created alternative ways of connecting to the electorate, but most scientists argue that the traditional mass media still considerably determine political discourse. (Su and Borah 2019; Ceron 2015)

7 The materials depicted in image 3 and 6 were retrieved by us during the respective campaigns from the website of the SVP in pdf or tiff format. They are currently not online.

8 This image was downloaded from the campaign website (bilaterale.ch) shortly after the campaign in .tiff format. The website is currently not online.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claudio Scarvaglieri

Claudio Scarvaglieri is Full Professor for German Linguistics at the German Department of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He holds a doctoral degree in German language and literature (Hamburg, Germany, 2011) and specializes in research on language in (mental) health, language attitudes and language ideologies and societal multilingualism. He is (co-)author of several books on language in the helping professions and PI of research projects on societal multilingualism as well as multilingualism and mental health.

Martin Luginbühl

Martin Luginbühl is Full Professor for German Linguistics at the German Department at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He studied German linguistics and literature, history and social history in Zurich, where he graduated in 1999 in German language and literature. His current research interests include oral argumentation skills, contrastive textology in media discourse, news online, genre history, and cultural linguistics. He is author and co-author of several books in the field of media linguistics, co-editor of the book series “Sprache in Kommunikation und Medien” (Lang) and PI of two research projects on oral argumentation skills of German speaking elementary school children. Board member of the national societies for Applied Linguistics in Switzerland (VALS-ASLA) and Germany (GAL).