Abstract (eng)
Social media are integrated into everyday life, and thus also into political thinking. However, such platforms are not a pure reflection of reality, but are characterized by routines, conventionalizations and stagings. Political parties and their politicians are also increasingly seeing the potential of Facebook, Instagram, and Co. This is where an important intersection emerges that needs to be explored: the visual communication of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) on Instagram. Namely, the party can be associated with a certain image of masculinity, which was investigated in practice, during the COVID-19 pandemic, using the method of quantitative image type analysis. The research question is: “How is populist masculinity portrayed on the official Instagram account of the Freedom Party of Austria (@fpoe_at) during the period of the COVID19 pandemic?” Based on the results, it can be seen how abruptly the political attitude of the party changes during the crisis and, in particular, how much value is placed on the party staging itself as the “protector” of the “people”. At the same time, populist masculinity also exists detached from the level of the person itself. The use of strong and direct language, the use of symbolic images and different colour schemes can also contribute to the portrayal. By combining populism in a moment of crisis and political masculinity, a new connection between the concepts was established through exploration at the visual level in social networks. This paper could be applied to other crisis moments or parties in the future.