Persuasive communication on the Facebook account of the “Alternative für Deutschland” Saxony

Abstract

Recent surveys and political research have shown that the acceptance of the political programmes of populist parties, such as the “Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)”, is relatively high amongst the population of the three eastern German federal states, especially in Saxony, where the AfD won nine of the 13 rural districts during the local elections in May 2019. Thus, it seems relevant to take a closer look at the persuasive discourse of a so-called populist party. In its public discourse, the AfD responds to the fears and concerns of those people who tend to use social media platforms to gain information when making political decisions. The aim of the article is to show which verbal and visual resources characterize the persuasive discourse of the AFD Saxony on their Facebook account. For this purpose, we propose a qualitative, multimodal analysis of selected entries which the party uploaded on its Facebook account between November 2018 and March 2019.

Keywords

• Facebook communication
• political populism
• horizontal and vertical populism
• persuasive speech
• filter bubble