Protecting the future ‘Us’: a rhetoric-performative multimodal analysis of the polarising far-right YouTube campaign videos in Finland

Abstract

The far right is active on social media, including YouTube for its outreach, community-building and mainstreaming of radical content. This article compares campaign videos of two distinct Finnish far-right parties. It develops a rhetoric-performative and multimodal analysis of audiovisual material and unveils how the contemporary Finnish far right articulates and performs affectively ‘us’ through counterhegemonic articulation on YouTube with connection to nostalgia, national war myths and misogyny. The analysis widens from the visual to the audio-visual dimension which enables the exploration of the formation of diverse signifiers and affective interpretations. Political actors refer to nationalist ideas in a way that can create and mainstream far-right ideology building on shared myths and even spread violent thoughts. Our analysis highlights the importance of spatial and temporal signifiers in the far-right meaning-making process.