Everyday extremism: memes and the mainstreaming of extremist narratives around the 2024 European Parliament election

This paper takes the 2024 European Parliament election as an empirical starting point to examine the circulation of extremist narratives on social media in three European countries: Sweden, Austria, and Bulgaria. Drawing on a visual content analysis of memes, the study focuses on visual articulations of violence and hostility directed towards perceived enemies and out-groups. The study asks: How did extremist narratives emerge around key contentious political issues? What forms of violence are articulated through these narratives? What shared visual grammars and coded symbols underpin the translocal entanglement of extremist narratives enabling them to travel across national boundaries and fuel everyday extremism in the digital mainstream? The findings highlight how memes contribute to what we term everyday extremism to describe a context in which dehumanising and violent narratives have been normalised to the point that they increasingly saturate everyday political discussions between ordinary citizens across Europe.