Populism in political cartoons: caricatures of Nordic populist leaders

This article analyses political cartoons that depict contemporary populist politicians in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden between 2005 and 2015, a period which focuses on the electoral successes of these movements. The hypothesis is that by analyzing cartoons we can explore the underlying moral and normative confrontations linked to current political populism in the Nordic liberal democracies, which arose during the insurgent phase of the domestic right-wing parties. In total, 60 political cartoons are analyzed by means of content categorization and visual semiotics. The most popular caricatures in the cartoons depicted the leaders of the populist parties, while the most common signifiers linked the populism in the cartoons explicitly to fascism, Nazism, nativism, and racism. In this, the cartoons differed from news journalism, reflecting the specific role of cartoons in public opinion discourse and indicating special characteristics that derive from particular political contexts and also the cartoonists' own perspectives.