Identitarian metapolitics in the new media environment: Tracing the rise and decline of a contemporary extreme right movement in Germany

The rise in the use of social media for political communication alongside traditional media outlets has led to questions about what types of political actors benefit from this new media environment. Much attention to date has been paid to populist parties, progressive social movements and far-right online subcultures like the ‘Alt-right’. There has been less focus however on contemporary far-right actors which operate outside of institutional politics and are not solely confined to the online realm. This paper fills this gap with a comprehensive analysis of the German Identitarian movement and its ‘metapolitics’. Emerging from previous attempts to refashion far-right politics for the post-war era, Identitarian ‘metapolitics’ is presented as a new media strategy that combines the provocation of press coverage through publicity stunts with the establishment of an online ‘counterculture’. The success of Identitarian metapolitics is assessed in the context of public and private regulation of ‘organised hate’. To this end, a novel dataset is created that spans over three years and combines over 500 articles published by three different media outlets with the social media activity of eleven accounts across six different platforms. The findings are that as regulation has increased press coverage of the Identitarian movement declined. Press coverage also increasingly emphasised the ‘anti-constitutional’ nature of the Identitarian campaign and covered less of their publicity stunts. For social media, regulation led to an increasing ‘personalisation’ of Identitarian metapolitics, where online activity became dominated by a single individual. These findings contribute to larger debates about how to safeguard democracy in light of extremist challenges orchestrated through the new media environment. In particular, this paper shows that political extremism is a cultural phenomenon and not only a question of electoral politics - a comprehensive strategy to strengthen democratic resilience must therefore acknowledge the joint responsibility of journalists and social media companies alongside the legislature.