Sense-making, plotting, and the fantasmatic logic

Narratives are a form of configuration device by which actors seek to make sense of the world and order it in a specific way. As Jerome Bruner famously remarked, ‘we organize our experiences and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative – stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on’.Footnote ³² Narrative approaches therefore assume that ‘human beings are inherently storytellers who have a natural capacity to recognize the coherence and fidelity of stories they tell and experience’.Footnote ³³ While a strict separation between ‘the real’ from ‘the fictional’ or the myth from the logos has been pervasive both in everyday as well as academic understandings, narratalogy challenges such clear boundaries. Our day-to-day language renders it obvious that the boundaries are blurred. It is not a coincidence that the evaluation of current political events (for example, the Brexit vote, Donald Trump's electoral victory, Erdoğan's rise) is often made tangible through the prism of literature (for example, Shakespearean drama), Netflix series (for example, House of Cards), and films (for example, The Great Dictator); or that politicians, in turn, seem to take cues from fictional representations to orchestrate their performances (for example, Macron posing in Versailles). Narrative approaches move social science research closer to the research agenda of cultural and literary studies by reconsidering the creative and strategic capacities in storytelling activities of all kinds.Footnote ³⁴

Narrative constructions of the world are therefore attempts at making sense of reality. Storytelling is subjective and linked to practical judgements of selective interpretation, personal experiences, and sequencing of events.Footnote ³⁵ Narratives require some sequential ordering of events, but the events themselves need not be real.Footnote ³⁶ As Barbara Czarniawska argues, when narrative is the ‘main device for making sense of social action’,Footnote ³⁷ it is also a political device that generates legitimacy and mutual agreements. It can be argued that the ‘successful legitimation of a political project relies on the narrative that is attached to it’.Footnote ³⁸ However, the efficacy of narrative depends on established sociocultural narrative conventions as a ‘stock of stories’ and therefore works dialogically.Footnote ³⁹ Searching for a common understanding through narrative is a fragile process of retelling stories and depends on cultural repertoires of distinct communities,Footnote ⁴⁰ including iconic images or common stories that do not necessarily resonate with other communities, for instance national security narratives.Footnote ⁴¹ Narratives are organised in particular configurations, or ‘plots’ that ‘weave together a complex of events to make a single story’.Footnote ⁴² The dimension of power is crucial when a narrative is configured and sequenced in a beginning, middle, and an end, that is, emplotment.Footnote ⁴³ To argue that narratives are always part of power relations does not imply that this refers to the material capacities of the storyteller. Rather, storytelling is embedded in cultural practices of communication and related to distinct opportunities of articulation. For instance, certain taboos – which could refer to historical precedents of belligerency – delimit narrative options, but can also be broken strategically. Recent articulations by far-right German politicians who relativised The Holocaust as historically insignificant, or praise for colonial times by UK politicians, followed by rather half-hearted public apologies, can be seen as strategic attempts at infringing upon particular taboos.Footnote ⁴⁴ More contingently, discourses open/close to respond to societal changes, such as discriminatory speech or cultural appropriation. The choice of plots is not endless, however. The classic plot genres in the tradition of Hayden White such as romance and tragedy work not only in literature and films; they also shape our practices of political storytelling.Footnote ⁴⁵ The negotiation of identity in political issues, such as postconflict situations, is mainly a negotiation of literary plots, as Nadim Khoury has shown.Footnote ⁴⁶

How narratives are configured and how knowledge is selectively appropriated is primarily an issue of claims to power and authority. Selecting the beginning of a story, for instance in processes of transitional justice, is already an intrinsically power-imbued action because it determines which information disappears, and which events are kept alive.Footnote ⁴⁷ Once a plot has been established, the association of events with actors is likely, also described as characterisation.Footnote ⁴⁸ Such transformations of actors into characters imply moral judgements. It makes a difference for policy options, for example, whether migrants are described as human beings seeking protection or as potential criminals. As it is rather difficult to define criteria for ‘successful’ political storytelling, policy analysts have reconstructed often-used storylines in policy controversies.Footnote ⁴⁹ Hendrik Wagenaar draws on narratology to show how political stories become appealing: they are open-ended and deal with possibilities not certainties; they are subjective and involve concrete people (as characters); they are value-laden and function through moral positioning; and they are action-oriented by providing suggestions and a certain measure of provisional certainty that allows persons to act at all.Footnote ⁵⁰

Political storytelling has its own logic, but is not completely detached from the larger cultural repository of familiar stories. As noted above, not all stories are equally successful – in the sense of their reception – which can be explained in part by their fit with known narratives, which contributes to their general potential for resonance. This resonance, which means the potential success, of storytelling is conditioned on the way in which people can relate to stories, but remains contingent. The idea of ‘fantasmatic logic’Footnote ⁵¹ helps us to contextualise how resonance can be created by ‘appeal’. The fantasmatic logic is instrumental in trying ‘to maintain existing social structures by pre-emptively absorbing dislocations, preventing them from becoming [politicised and transformed]’.Footnote ⁵² Assuming a general desire for countering the lack (of fulfilment) individuals experience in their life, fantasy bridges inconsistencies and thus prevents issues from becoming part of the domain of the political, where these meanings, articulations, and identities are instituted and challenged through hegemonic struggles, contestations, resistance, and dislocations. This is important, since grand narratives of today's politics function only because of constant attempts at removing them from the everyday business of political squabbling, and thus make them less likely to be challenged. For the analysis of social phenomena, identifying political logics helps to demonstrate how social practices are constituted and transformed, whereas fantasmatic logics reveal why certain political projects are supported whereas others are not.Footnote ⁵³

The introduction of fantasmatic logics does not assume a neat distinction between the dimensions, but pays closer attention to the subjects addressed by storytelling. The removal of problems and issues from the political arena to the realm of the fantasmatic renders these underlying issues invisible and alters their perception, for instance by making lies (or ‘alternative facts’) irrelevant as long as strong emotions can override them. More precisely, issues presented in the fantasmatic logic can evoke pleasure in their recipients – both through positive messages (for example, ‘Empire’, see below) and negative ones (for example, agreeing that the imprisonment of migrant children is horrible). As political visions, this can mean ‘the beatific dimension of fantasy – or which foretells of disaster if the obstacle proves insurmountable, which might be termed the horrific dimension of fantasy’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The rejection of elites or the ridicule towards ‘political correctness’ can thus generate responses that replace concerns for affordability or feasibility, which would classically be addressed in the political realm. As a consequence, (political) contestation is difficult because the object of contestation is seemingly apolitical and cannot be addressed on the same plane as a more concrete political promise of, for instance, higher wages or tax cuts. Politics, as practices that involve planning and implementing programmes, rarely follow the logic of the political alone, which is why the idea of fantasmatic logic is an interesting addition to understanding how political storytelling can be rendered appealing.

For instance, the recent re-election of Narendra Modi as Indian prime minister despite his failure to implement his promises for economic growth has largely been attributed to his clear Hindu-nationalist and anti-Muslim stance, which apparently also mobilised enormous numbers of voters who had been harmed by his policies.Footnote ⁵⁵ Appealing to a fantasy of purity and unity (in a heterogeneous state like India), Modi's election campaign narratives resonated with the public so well that election results of 2019 trumped those of 2014, which surprised all political observers, including his own party. The example of Trump's ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan or the UK's UKIP story of a return to British Empire-era greatness similarly have little connection to everyday policies and politics, but instead propose visions that have clearly appealed to political audiences. Both evoke feelings of pride or desires for a better life and are attempts at depoliticisation. One of the main uses of fantasy in emplotment is in providing points of identification. ‘When successfully installed, a fantasmatic narrative hooks the subject – via the enjoyment it procures – to a given practice or order, or a promised future practice or order, thus conferring identity’.Footnote ⁵⁶

In that regard, stories can function as ‘affective triggers insofar as emotions and narrative are deeply intertwined’.Footnote ⁵⁷ At the same time, the intertwinement between narrative and emotion also goes the other way, as the meaning of emotion is hard to disentangle from narrative emplotment.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison argue, ‘emotions help us make sense of ourselves, and situate us in relation to others and the world that surrounds us’.Footnote ⁵⁹ ‘They frame forms of personal and social understanding, and are thus inclinations that lead individuals to locate their identity within a wider collective.’Footnote ⁶⁰ They can create a certain kind of ‘collective attachment’Footnote ⁶¹ decades after the end of the Second World War, the history of victory and defeat still shapes European relations and the political storytelling of the European Union. The narratives used to unite people under a common affective storyline that both conveys emotional content and offers emotional orientation create identities around content and emotions alike, oscillating between political and fantasmatic logics.

Fantasmatic logic, in particular, can provide a supplement to the understanding of politics as solely oriented towards specific goals:Footnote ⁶² ‘[m]oreover, such logics typically rely upon narratives which possess features distributed between public-official and unofficial forums. This is because fantasies seek directly to conjure up – or at least presuppose – an impossible union between incompatible elements. … In addition, we could say that aspects of social reality having to do with fantasmatically structured enjoyment often possess contradictory features, exhibiting a kind of extreme oscillation between incompatible positions.’Footnote ⁶³ Finally, as Bleiker and Hutchison further argue, the influence that representations of emotion exert on political dynamics is particularly evident in the realm of visual culture.Footnote ⁶⁴ While in IR, images of extreme crisis events such as September 11 or the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib are used to demonstrate the politics of emotion,Footnote ⁶⁵ we focus on images in populist election campaigning to highlight the linkage between narratives and images with regard to their appeal. In the following chapter, we will show how to integrate visual analysis into narrative analysis.

Doing visual narrative analysis

Similar to metaphors, images – including videos, memes, or similar pictorial items – are another shortcut to identifying narratives, since they incorporate different layers of information, ranging from the obvious surface of what is depicted to allusions and intertextual references that create (and possibly limit) horizons of interpretation, the interrelation between ‘being, knowing and becoming’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Images that also include written text, such as the election campaign posters we are all familiar with, combine imagery with clear textual messages, often with allusions to political narratives in both genres.

Our analysis is oriented towards the methodological suggestion by Axel Heck and Gabi SchlagFootnote ⁷⁷ to use the iconological approach in the tradition of Erwin PanofskyFootnote ⁷⁸ for analysing images.Footnote ⁷⁹ This enables us ‘to see how images symbolically perform how we see what we see’ (by taking their social embeddedness into account).Footnote ⁸⁰ Similarly, our technique can be understood as layered interpretation, that is, as a combination between iconological and narratological approaches. A reconstruction of narratives that starts by contextualising metaphors and images can add layer upon layer of interpretation, since symbolism used in text and images can mean different things in different contexts. We make a further interpretive move towards understanding the underlying presuppositions of the images and their performative dimension by pointing to the interpretive closure that narratives may produce for future political action.

In a first step, we describe and analyse the image; composition, atmosphere, symbolism, etc. can be studied in isolation from all other contextual information. Furthermore, we consider the cultural allusions of images, providing intertextual context of the visual presentation. In a second step, the textual comment will be added. We reconstruct how image and text are positioned towards each other, for example, whether they are complementary or juxtaposed, and analyse how they create and delimit opportunities for certain interpretations and affective responses. This goes beyond visual analysis, since the narrative content of an image can be very different from its textual supplement; for instance, an image can draw upon certain kinds of cultural repertoires, like well-known art historical topoi, while the text draws upon others. In a third step, we will add the narrative context, in terms of plots, roles, and relations. Here, different images can be related to each other, to show how a political narrative is created around metaphors and images. We refer back to recent research on populism in order to see how our findings resonate with their insights. Identifying larger, polyphonic structures adds a fourth layer, which most explicitly demonstrates the importance of narrative studies in the social sciences.

Honest Men Under Threat

A key populist narrative is the imagination of a ‘true body’ of the people that is under threat by external (evil) forces such as the EU, the capitalist system, or migrants, and that needs to be protected by the ‘true people’, who are ignored by their corrupt political elites. During the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, in many European countries, metaphors of neverending streams of migrants became dominant, which evoked feelings of powerlessness, excessive demand, and loss of control. The voice of the migrants, who seek protection, disappeared in political discourses. Thus, the ‘crisis’ was perceived as a technical problem or even a natural catastrophe, which needed to be solved or contained. Many right-wing populists used this discursive shift to legitimise a stronger isolationist policy against immigration. The UKIP campaign is a particular case as the political movement was eventually successful in pushing the populist narrative around the combination of the EU and migrants as enemy images, which mobilised collective emotions of insecurity and heteronomy.

On one of the most controversially discussed UKIP campaign posters we find the image of a human chain of migrants, whose end disappears in the blurry horizon and therefore supports the metaphor of a neverending stream. The main slogan ‘Breaking Point’ deals with the feeling of powerlessness to support the claim of an overstretching limit, and the additional slogan ‘The EU Has Failed Us All’ provides the moral judgement for the responsibility of the crisis. The visualisation operates with an objectification as single individuals and suffering people are not recognisable.Footnote ⁸⁴ The visualised faceless mass suppresses feelings of empathy and supports the populist narrative of ‘Take Back Control of Our Country’. While this campaign poster example transports its clearly racist message also through a combination of image and text and mobilises collective emotions in distinct communities between fear and disgust, there is no need of a deeper analysis. A more interesting case in the same context of the imagination of the ‘true body of the people’ with regard to the suggestion of visual narrative analysis is the figure of fisherman Tony. Here, the populist message and the desired emotional mobilisation are more ambivalent.

Fisherman Tony as cipher for the ‘forgotten white men’

Tony Rutherford became one of the famous figures of the UKIP campaign, as he symbolised a typical British fisherman and used his popularity to give patriotic statements around EU fishing quotas in public debate.Footnote ⁸⁵ On the campaign poster, this elderly fisherman is shown in his work gear, wearing a red plaid shirt underneath yellow overalls. He sports the typical black cap of a fisherman and is positioned in front of several small boats in a little harbour, carrying a rope in his right hand and a fish he apparently caught in the left. The visual configuration puts Tony, who is positioned on the left front side of the image, in the focus of the viewer, mainly because of the sharp contrast between the colourful figure of Tony and the grey, cloudy background. Tony looks serious and resigned, like a man who has lost his hope for a better future and knows that he needs to continue his hard labour until the end of his life. The harbour environment also precludes feelings of optimism, as it looks grey, deserted, and bleak. No other person is seen to be working there. The image may evoke sympathy for Tony,Footnote ⁸⁶ who works hard but seems to be alone and forgotten, much like the steel workers in America's rust belt.Footnote ⁸⁷

The slogan reads: ‘Gutted. Tony's business has been ripped apart by the EU.’ While ‘Gutted’ at a first glance and mainly addresses Tony's disappointment with the EU, the pun on literally ‘gutting’ fish creates a close linkage to the image, adding a further textual layer. Tony therefore appears as a stereotype of the hard-working patriot who has been betrayed by the elites of the EU, as the slogan ‘Gutted’ suggests. The EU is clearly characterised in the role of a technocratic destroyer of the traditional, but good life by the claim that ‘Tony's business has been ripped apart by the EU’. The dramatisation of crisis, breakdown, or threat is a repetitive plot pattern in populism.Footnote ⁸⁸ Similarly, UKIP presents itself as the ‘only one party [that] will stand up for you’, according to the slogan. The populist narrative suggests that people like Tony have a clear option to come out of their hopeless situation by voting for a party that has not forgotten them. The fact that they know the fisherman by name reinforces the idea that UKIP is deeply interested in him and others like him. The Union Jack logo, in combination with the slogan ‘Believe in Britain’ provides an emotionalised storyline of patriotism and ways for ameliorating the dramatic condition of suffering workingmen. There are ways of overcoming feelings of humiliation, the message implies. The plot of betrayal points to the moral break that causes the governed to lose trust in the government. Thus, the government has lost its legitimacy to act in the name of the people, as they no longer serve their interests.

In another image of the UKIP campaign, the top candidates of the other parties (David Cameron, etc.) are gagged by a blue ribbon in the colours of the EU and the symbolic stars. They have lost their voice, the UKIP slogan indicates. The people cannot trust them anymore, because they are the mute puppets of EU bureaucrats. The only man that is not gagged, and thus able to speak freely, is Nigel Farage. He is therefore the only option to change the condition of voicelessness, and to fight for people like Tony, whose trust in the government has been lost. The narrative plays with the typically constructed populist antagonism between an external, corrupt system of political actors who have lost all touch with society and act in a bubble of profit and nepotism, and the ‘true people’ or ‘honest men’.Footnote ⁸⁹ The underlying insinuation is that the elites in government are simply not interested in the needs and concerns of ordinary people. These people, however, represent the lost, but true patriotic spirit of the ‘body of the people’, who deserve more respect from politicians.Footnote ⁹⁰

Figure 1.

‘Gutted’.

Source: https://politicaladvertising.co.uk/2015/04/09/gutted/ (UKIP).

It is no coincidence that the figure of Tony, UKIP, and the EU are all represented by male figures. The threat of emasculation, implied in Tony's defeated stance and the gagging of British politicians, equates to the loss of control that a UK within the EU faces. Only by reclaiming control can men return to their perceived traditional role and regain their masculinity. A profession like fishing, which is predominantly male and working class, symbolises good, simple masculine life that is portrayed as unpolluted by postmodern lifestyles. Thus, the EU, similarly perhaps to the constraints of modern life (with its political correctness, technologies, and gender equality), embodies a fundamental threat – ‘gutted’ means killed and massacred – to a good life for men. The underlying fear of men like Tony of becoming irrelevant in this modern world is perfectly captured in the antagonism between the simple fisherman and the remote, uncaring and technocratic EU.

Ghost of the heartland

With a broader view, the example of Tony shows that the combination of image and text creates more complex narratives around collective emotions. What makes the example of fisherman Tony interesting from the viewpoint of visual narrative analysis is that it summons an image of a better, bygone world from the country's past. Fishermen have done their jobs for centuries or even millennia and are thus metaphors of the true Britain that existed long before the advent of the EU. Famous paintings of fishermen at sea who struggle against the forces of nature (for example by William Turner) come to mind.Footnote ⁹¹ Thus, Tony's world seems to be more real and honest than the busy life of bankers in remote, elitist London.Footnote ⁹²

Paul Taggart used the term heartland to explain that the category of ‘the people’ remains abstract, whereas the imagination of a backward-looking utopia in the past mobilises collective fantasies of a better world.Footnote ⁹³ The heartland metaphor evokes imaginations of a romanticised, ahistorical, and ideal world such as ‘Middle America’, or ‘La France Profonde’. Political narratives relate these imaginations via roles depicted by the likes of Tony the fisherman, or the steel workers in the rust belt in Trump's campaign, and thus create the desire for a purer life and world, in which the complex problems of our time are not present. This contradiction to the EU's support of structural change of formerly industrial regions is neglected and depoliticised by use of the fantasmatic logic. The existing problem of economic transformation in the industrial sector in many Western countries is reframed as a romantic myth of an ideal heartland as a place of harmony and wealth. Yet, the narrative construction around ideas of inward-looking (national) organic communities denies pluralism as it provides justifications ‘for the exclusion of the demonized’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Such a narrative is mainly directed at men who are believed to suffer disproportionately from these economic transformations and struggle with the challenges of globalisation. The promise of a heartland through visual storytelling is a means for identification and appeal to honest, patriotic working people, and creates the misleading imaginary ideal of an easy political solution for them.

The UKIP campaign is a prime example of how right-wing populists draw on this heartland narrative in the distinct cultural context of the formerly glorious British Empire and how this leads to a further competition between political narratives over the authority to dominate the polyphonic discourse. This is the fourth step of layering and leads us to the political controversy around and after the Brexit referendum. In the desperate search by former prime minister Theresa May for a pragmatic solution to the Brexit decision, the different groups of political actors lead the debate to a radicalised antagonism between the two options of leaving the EU (‘hard Brexit’) or remaining in the EU through a new referendum. The ghost of the heartland narrative produces a toxic mixture for the culture of debating and leaves no space anymore for compromise. It is further pushed by conservative hardliners like Jacob Rees-Mogg and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who create different stories around the plot of betrayal against the people, which gains moral weight by claiming a quest for truth, emancipatory action, and a call for justice in the face of deceit. Johnson, for instance, recently reactivated the Honest Men Under Threat narrative by the fictional claim that the EU ruins British fishermen on the (non-EU) Isle of Man through rules to keep fish fresh in a plastic ice pillow (in fact a regulation issued by the UK government). He even held a fish in his hands (like Tony in the poster) during a speech to complain about ‘pointless’ kipper rules and to show solidarity with the British fishermen.Footnote ⁹⁵ The fantasy of this betrayal of honest men in a true Britain has been narrated in different variations, including references to somewhat fictional historical periods in which the UK was free from external influence,Footnote ⁹⁶ and particularly to the loss of its Empire.Footnote ⁹⁷

Fintan O'Toole describes the cultural background of this specific British narrative as the ‘pleasures of self-pity’, which involves two complementing parts: a deep feeling of loss and a simultaneous feeling of superiority.Footnote ⁹⁸ The plot of betrayal in combination with victim myths and heroic stories is particularly relevant to populist narratives, as it not only mobilises collective emotions of anger, indignation, and pain, but even creates possibilities for agency.Footnote ⁹⁹ The underlying demand that you as true representatives of the people need to reclaim your country (which otherwise will be lost) enables different, more positive collective emotions such as confidence and pride. While moderate British politicians try to tell the story of cooperation, mutual trust, and British benefits of being part of the EU, Brexiteers put emphasis on the dystopic fantasy of a battle against the EU as the incorporation of the German will to subject the British continent.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Populists therefore promise a political solution to the dystopian situation of hopelessness, humiliation, and vassalage. The heartland narrative shows how chosen body metaphors in relation to the nation and the people provoke collective emotions (fear and anger), strong moral judgements (elites as traitors), and feelings of self-enactment in terms of agency for ‘forgotten white men’. In terms of ‘the political’ logic, one would have to point out that the European Union has been a project that counters the negative effects of imperial expansion, whereas in terms of ‘the fantasmatic’ logic, an empire would blissfully replace the EU with the historical greatness merited by the British people. The idea of becoming part of an empire is therefore more pleasing and appealing than the reality of the European Union – even if upon further reflection, the re-establishment of an empire by any British party is an unlikely goal.

Proud Mothers

The second case is, at first glance, less concerned with a political message. Depicting a well-known (former) German politician of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, the main message of this poster could be seen in simply advertising Frauke Petry, but nothing else. In the depiction of a woman with a child we identify a culturally appropriate motif, but less so a politically adequate one. As a way of sending a political message in the setting of a western European country, female politicians with children, particularly babies, are rather unfamiliar. As distinct to the threat of emasculation that fisherman Tony faces, women (almost as a continuation of children) in right-wing storytelling are primarily depicted as victims of foreign men, rather than by the EU or similar entities. In fact, the sample of posters we studied often showed these motifs, either as direct threats to women's/children's safety or as threats to their ontological security (for example, in the slogan ‘Bikinis instead of Burkas’ or posters in the aftermath of attacks on women in Cologne). In our analysis, we found that the majority of images by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) portraying women or children, for instance, point to the need to protect daughters and wives, who thereby become objects of masculine displays of strength.

However, images of women are never used to represent groups of men and women, such as employees, tax payers, etc., but only to represent other, equally vulnerable women. Interestingly, this does by no means reflect the fact that women are integral parts of the labour force and also receive social transfer benefits (like Tony) or that they could be won over as voters instead of their partners to whom appeals for women's safety seem to be addressed. Therefore, before even looking in more depth at the poster of Petry's, we contextualise it as an outlier in the clear gender division into males as agents and women/children as subject of politics. At the same time, it uses a completely different style from other posters that feature women, which show them in traditional folk costume, as objects of sexual desire or as primarily vulnerable to dark males. The neutral presentation is very much in line with how male professionals are presented and thus seemingly harmless. As part of its election campaign in 2017, one of the AfD's (former) leaders, Frauke Petry, posed with her own baby. The poster was somewhat scandalised for this reason, since utilising children for political gain was seen as overly strategic and immoral. Beyond this calculated move at publicity, our layered analysis helps to show what the image itself and the image/text combination offer in terms of potential appeal to the public.

Motherhood and politics

We see, at first, the female politician, looking into the camera with a calm, confident smile. Her short, severely cut hair and sparingly applied makeup as well as her modest business shirt do not distract from the main focus of the image: The baby, dressed in a neutral greyish top, is asleep and trustingly held by the mother, who displays her wedding band on the hand that holds the child. The background is kept neutral, in a greenish grey that creates no distraction from the mother with child. The skin-to-skin contact between mother and child, the protective hand on top of the baby's head, and the angle of the mother's head are visually arranged to a pleasing ensemble.

The abstract motif is well known in art and clerical history; the Madonna with child has strong cultural – Western, Christian – roots and is evoked here in the way mother and child pose. Even those not consciously engaged with the Church will have implicit knowledge about the motif in their cultural repertoire. Given the fact that Petry was married to a Christian parson, had four children with him, had an affair with another AfD politician, had the new child with him and was divorced and then remarried, the Madonna motif is an interesting choice. At the same time, the image conveys a sense of serenity, a unique mood that only a mother and baby can create. The universal love of babies provides affective triggers and an emotional storyline at the same time, even for those who may despise the politician. The image may serve to establish Petry's credibility as a party leader and to confer legitimacy as a caring mother. The image of the innocent child and devoted mother camouflages the fact that Petry was a known power politician and, in contrast with the regressive thinking of the party, herself a working mother. This needs further reflection.

Adding the textual layer, we read: ‘Frauke Petry, Chair of the AfD. And what is your reason to fight for Germany? Take courage, Germany’ [or, in a broader reading, ‘Get married, Germany’]! The belligerent slogan stands in stark contrast to the serene mood of the image and thus creates a productive friction. It directly addresses the audience, drawing it into a discussion. The slogan also works on a presupposition, that is, claims that every reader in fact wishes (or should do so) to fight for ‘Germany’. No further explication of the fight or even of the idea of ‘Germany’ is given, since the addressed audience apparently would not question the presupposition – or if they did, would not be the addressed audience.

The main implication of the slogan is that a mother should fight for the future of her child. The idea of ‘fighting’ forms a second fantastic layer in the already emotionally loaded image of a mother with her newborn child. It implies sacrifice, passion, and aggression – all for the sake of a future generation. Here, the heroism of a mother fighting for a child – by means of politics – renders political action a personal mission, a cause greater than that of candidates competing for office. The plot of a hero (or heroine, in this case) fighting against an enemy (possibly the foreign infiltration by migrants, many of whom are seen to have many children) for a true people is invoked. A heroine, it can be assumed, is more than a simple politician.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Petry presents herself both as a party politician (dressed as most other politicians from more established parties would) and as all (German) mothers; her reasons for pursuing politics are the purest. This mirrors what proponents of fantasmatic logic have claimed, namely that politics can be depoliticised to make it more palatable. The fantasy of politics without politicians – corrupt elites – underlies this imagery. Petry's dual role as politician and mother is what is meant to make her so convincing: she is not in politics as part of an egotistic struggle, but for personal reasons. The baby, as all true Germans would be, is in her care, and thus she can be trusted to fight for the people rather than for her own gain. The appeal therefore lies in believing that a party like the AfD seem less ambitious or less involved in petty struggles than other parties,Footnote ¹⁰² to which the AfD aims to become an alternative.

Figure 2.

‘And what is your reason to fight for Germany? Take courage, Germany’.

Source: https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Petry-will-mit-Ferdinand-werben-article19949766.html (AfD).

The fantasmatic appeal of the image and the broader narrative becomes tangible by understanding the near impossibility of having a negative reaction to the image of a mother with child. Even a controversial figure like Frauke Petry can expect to be respected as a mother, regardless of her political stance. The vulnerability of a mother with child serves as a protective shield against too harsh criticism. Only the slogan adds a political message to the otherwise depoliticised Madonna image. In conjunction with the benign image, the slogan is rendered less aggressive but also more credible. Different frictions characterise the poster and work in conjunction to offer different interpretive anchors that allow for a broader appeal. Traditionalists may applaud Petry for being a mother first and a politician on top. More nationalist supporters of AfD may welcome the not too subtle message that there needs to be a fight for Germany, which Petry will lead. The ‘proud motherhood‘ narrative both establishes the people – true ‘Germans’ – and the mode of doing politics – as a ‘fight’ for a just cause – and uses the symbolism of female roles of motherhood to bring the message home. Others may find it easier to vote for a former fringe party that manages to present itself so professionally, without reverting to unsubtle friend–foe imagery. All these and possible other interpretations buy into the fantasy that motherhood and nationalist politics are connected, but satisfy different needs with it.

We are not the elite

Similar to Donald Trump's, Matteo Salvini's, or Boris Johnson's attempts to present themselves above petty party politics, Petry being a mother immunises her from being suspected of serving self-interest. Thus, she is not just a politician, but more than a politician. The ‘Proud Mother’ narrative thus links up to a central tenet of populist, particularly right-wing parties across several countries, namely a ‘we are not the elite’ narrative.Footnote ¹⁰³ Claiming to counter established, elite-driven modes of politics – embodied in such generalising metaphors as ‘the D.C. swamp’ or simply ‘Brussels’ – populist parties promise alternative, responsive modes of doing politics. At the same time, they must necessarily campaign to achieve power and, for instance, claim the White House – which means they have to reconcile two inconsistent messages. Furthermore, many of the candidates that claim to take an anti-elitist stance are clearly part of the elite themselves; Brexit campaigners like former Eton pupil Boris Johnson, trust fund baby Donald Trump, and second-generation party leader Marine Le Pen are white, wealthy, and come from well-connected, affluent families. Even current French president Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker and ENA graduate, claimed to lead a ‘movement’ rather than a party in order to signal his departure from corrupt, inert party politics. As noted above, fantasmatic logic often functions to reconcile contradictory claims. One well-known example of an attempt to bridge such positions can be found in Donald Trump's public self-representation. Posing with his family in his lavishly decorated New York City apartment, Trump projected a public persona of a man wealthy and influential beyond measure. Already ever-present in the public eye as a television show celebrity, Trump presented the image of a somewhat vulgar (that is, relatable) public figure without any need to strive for the office of US president, thus conveying the underlying message that he had no other motivation for becoming a politician than ‘making America great again’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Beyond this, the strength of the image under discussion here lies in its metaphors and implicit messages that make a world ruled by the parties advertised seem attractive to their voters; both to men, who struggle with their roles in modern societies characterised by calls for political correctness and claims for gender equality, and women who may thus reconcile their conservative beliefs with a politically relevant taskFootnote ¹⁰⁵ – that is, not being just mothers, but mothers with a deeper purpose, namely the protection of a truly German people.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The silences created by this and similar posters as opposed to those used by other parties are also telling. Many centrist parties increasingly diversify their images in terms of ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, even clothing styles, and so on. Women of colour, gay couples, urban hipsters, and so on have become indicators of a diverse, open society promoted by most mainstream parties. They are almost entirely absent in the campaign posters of right-wing populists we found – repetitive patterns of showing blonde children, devoted mothers, women as helpless victims of foreign men, etc. reify reactionary images and mobilise those that feel threatened by diversity (summarised as the ‘new Germans’), new styles of living, and overall growing levels of equality. The fantasmatic appeal of an old-fashioned but time-tested lifestyle cannot be underestimated.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Fighting for these worthy causes is claimed to be a humanistic mission rather than politics, which is often portrayed as corrupt and self-interested in right-wing populist narratives.