Performing Heimat: TikTok and the Discursive Politics of Belonging in South Tyrol

This paper examines how two right-wing populist regional actors in South Tyrol—Süd-Tiroler Freiheit (STF) and Liste JWA—construct and circulate political “truths” through their TikTok presences. The paper investigates how these actors produce alternative truth regimes that combine historical claims, demographic anxieties, and ethnonationalist imaginaries with the vernacular, affective and highly personalized styles characteristic of TikTok. Through a critical discourse analysis enriched with multimodal discourse theory, the study analyses a corpus of STF and JWA TikTok videos (2023–2025). The analysis focuses on discursive strategies (nomination, predication, argumentation), the affective staging of belonging and threat, and the use of platform-specific semiotic resources—viral audio, on-screen text, filters, humor, and vernacular aesthetics—to normalize and legitimize exclusionary narratives. The paper traces how claims to represent the “real people” of South Tyrol are established through appeals to history, pseudo-scientific demographic reasoning, anti-elite rhetoric and stylized performances of authenticity. The paper argues that TikTok’s algorithmic infrastructures amplify specific kinds of affective truth-making, enabling regionalist far-right actors to hybridize ethnonationalist tropes, minority-language protection narratives and anti-immigration frames within an emotionally resonant and easily shareable repertoire. This aligns with emerging research showing how far-right actors mobilize the platform’s participatory and memetic cultures to diffuse radical ideas through everyday, relatable content.