Türkiye’s Visual Representation in Right-Wing Populist Discourse

The influence and contribution of populist political parties through their discourse and style on multifaceted representations should not be disregarded at a time when populism studies have grown steadily and gained maturity. Therefore, this book presents a multimodal discourse analysis to explore how Türkiye is portrayed in and through the right-wing populist style of the Alternative for Germany party (AfD). According to the pertinent literature, Türkiye has been represented antagonistically rather than favorably throughout Europe. This book is designed to ascertain the contributions of the right-wing populist parties to the existent discourses and representations, accordingly, analysed how and through which representation strategies Türkiye has been located in the right-wing populist style both semantically and visuatlly.
By archiving 4088 AfD party campaign visuals posted on their public social media accounts between 2013 and 2021, the representation strategies of multimodal discourse analysis, which encompasses the synthesis and interaction of various modes such as texts and visuals in the meaning-making process, were reviewed, interpreted, and applied to the party campaign visuals. The book suggests that the AfD has maintained Türkiye's negative representation and added additional layers to the existing stigmatizing representations, which has caused the negative representation to be reinforced and reified.