Emotional Truth: Visual Narratives and Strategic Affectivity of the Far Right on TikTok during the European political dynamics

Abstract

This article analyzes how European far-right leaders used TikTok during the 2024 European Parliament election campaign to construct emotional truths through visual, narrative, and affective resources. Drawing on a sample of 472 videos posted by 27 far-right party leaders in 19 countries, it applies a mixed methodology of quantitative and qualitative content analysis, organized into three blocks: ideological contextualization, profile characterization, and systematic examination of the audiovisual content. The results show that TikTok has become a strategic space for articulating narratives that carefully combine negative emotions (fear, danger, disgust) with positive ones (pride, hope, enjoyment, empathy), shaping a hybrid aesthetics that alternates between denunciation of the present and the promise of renewal. The most frequent topics focus on campaign events, calls to vote, criticism of the political system, and immigration, while explicit references to young people are scarce and are instead replaced by implicit strategies of connection based on visual style, informal language, and identity codes. The analysis of normalized engagement reveals that content associated with personal enjoyment, vulnerability, hope, and the defence of traditional values achieves higher proportional interaction than that grounded in intense negativity or pride. The study concludes that TikTok operates as a privileged device for the dissemination of emotional truths, understood as narrative constructions that are plausible due to their affective resonance rather than their factual basis, reinforcing the mobilizing capacity of the far right among young audiences.