Haf haf! The role of dogs in Czech populist political communication on social media

When dogs appear on a politician’s Facebook page amidst the typical posts about policy and disagreement with opponents, they may seem like a welcome break from the general furor. In the Czech political system, candidates from across the political spectrum often posts photos of themselves with their own or others’ dogs. These are often very popular posts, garnering positive reactions and adoring comments. But do they really matter when it comes to politics? And if candidates from across the ideological spectrum post canine imagery, can their presence inform us about anything besides their popularity in the Czech Republic? In the self-mediated space that Facebook offers, politicians are able to choose how to represent themselves through images posted to their pages, and thus the presence of dog-related is notable. This paper will investigate the roles that dogs play on the public pages of the two most prominent populist politicians: the managerial centrist populist Andrej Babiš, currently the prime minister and the leader of the ANO party, and the right-wing populist Tomio Okamura, leader of the SPD party. All of the visual posts containing dogs that appear on Babiš and Okamura’s public Facebook pages from throughout 2020, including both the posts themselves and the public comments below them, will make up the data for this study. It will rest on a methodological framework of Laclaudian rhetoric-performative post-foundational discourse analysis. Using a comparison of the discursive positions that dogs occupy in the social media communication of these two populist politicians, it will argue that dogs are not just adorable faces; instead, they can actually play a small but crucial role in the building of a populist movement.