The next speaker at the the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Nico Spreen, whose focus is on the use of TikTok by populist parties in Germany during the 2025 federal election. TikTok may be expected to be especially valuable as a campaigning tool for populist parties, given its personalised, emotionalised, and algorithmically amplified content processes. Also, both the left-wing Linke and far-right AfD are especially popular with voters under 25, so there is substantial overlap between their voter bases and the TikTok userbase.
What shape does their populist communication take, then? Such communication usually employs people-centrism, anti-elitism, and an exclusion of out-groups; in combination, these can manifest as thin populism, anti-elitism, exclusionary populism, or thick populism. Further, content may employ communicative strategies of negativity, emotionalisation, and sociability. How were these distributed across the parties’ TikTok videos, then, and what level of engagement did they produce?
This project engaged in a semi-automated quantitative content analysis of four accounts each from the AfD, Linke, and the smaller BSW party during the last weeks of the campaign; it focussed on the speech components within these videos, which were coded for key messages and stylistic features., and captured audience interactions relative to views.
The AfD used populist key messages far more than the other parties (56% compared to 10% for BSW and 11% for Linke); 80% of all videos for the three parties contained no populist key messages at all, though. AfD messages were also distributed across thin populism, anti-elitism, exclusion, and (much less so) thick populism. BSW was stronger on negativity than the other parties; AfD was stronger on emotionalisation; Linke was stronger on sociability and most often (in 48% of its videos) also employed no distinct communicative strategy at all.
None of these features seemed to have any effect on engagement, however. Only thin populism was directly associated with higher user engagement. This means that there is no shared populist playbook, but differences in populist styles also do not pay off in terms of engagement anyway; what works here is not full-blown populism as such, but merely the thin populism of signalling closeness to the people.
These findings do not take into account the audiovisual styles of these videos, however, which may also play a role here – and it will be useful to compare them with an analysis of the videos of non-populist parties, to see whether and how they employ any such features.
