Flexible populist ideology during Russia's war in Ukraine: A multimodal analysis of internet memes.

This article examines how the right-wing populist Finns Party (FP) in Finland used political internet memes during the early months of Russia's 2022 war in Ukraine to flexibly articulate and reconstruct populist ideology amid international political turmoil. Through multimodal discourse analysis of ten official FP memes posted on Facebook, the study identifies three interlinked discourses: national sovereignty and security, (gendered) anti-elitism, and anti-refugee rhetoric, all mobilizing the "Russian threat" as a central discursive resource. The memes' multimodal features—such as humor, intertextuality, open-endedness, and visual-verbal interplay—enabled the FP to position itself as protector of the Finnish nation against external (Russia) and internal (government) threats, while simultaneously adapting its anti-refugee stance to the geopolitical context of Ukrainian refugees. The findings highlight the adaptability of populism as a "thin" ideology and demonstrate how memes serve as effective, malleable tools for right-wing populist political mobilization and persuasion in times of crisis.