“He Who Loves Animals Cannot Hate People”: Cuteness, Affect, and Far-Right Normalisation Through Cat Content

During the 2023 Dutch general election campaign, Geert Wilders appeared on a public children’s TV program cuddling kittens in an animal shelter. The item titled “Cuddling Cats with Geert Wilders” blurred political boundaries and contributed to the normalisation of the far-right politician. The strategy proved effective, as illustrated by a response to a post on X: “A man like this only radiates love. He who loves animals cannot hate people.” Taking Wilders as a starting point, this paper explores how European far-right leaders deploy (feline) cuteness and positive emotions on Instagram to create low-threshold entry points into their ideological universe. Building on the emerging research strands around the aesthetic and affective dimensions of cuteness (Dale et al. 2017) and personalised political communication (Metz et al. 2019), this study thus shows how far-right actors integrate animal imagery into their everyday social media personas. As recent research on “pawpulism” (van Beek 2024) suggests, animals, especially cats, serve not just as content but as emotional ambassadors that humanise and soften extremist actors. Drawing from these bodies of work, we seek to understand 1) when and how far-right leaders use animal imagery, in particular cats, as part of their digital self-presentation; 2) what affective dynamics are mobilised through “cuteness”; and 3) in what way this content contributes to the emotional immersion, normalisation, and soft acceptance of far-right actors in everyday digital culture? Methodologically, we adopt a comparative approach and conduct qualitative visual analysis of a large amount of empirical data drawn from Instagram. Our case selection includes more than ten far-right party leaders from across Europe. Indeed, this phenomenon is not unique to Wilders: From Jimmie Åkesson (Sverigedemokraterna) to Marine Le Pen (Rassemblement National), and from Giorgia Meloni (Fratelli d’Italia) to Andre Ventura (Chega), leading far-right figures across Europe increasingly post cat-related content. Our preliminary results suggest that 1) a European far-right leaders employ cat content in their social media communication, and especially on Instagram, 2) images of cute cats allow these leaders to present themselves in a positive light, e.g. as animal welfare activists or as ‘everyday’ men at home, on the sofa, etc., 3) cat content is a carrier of positive emotions, including affection and humour. Overall, this study contributes to the growing body of work on the normalization and mainstreaming of the far right and everyday extremism on social media and beyond. Employing the lens of ‘the cute’, it assesses the far right from a novel perspective that works not through confrontation, but through affective familiarity and everyday cultural codes, affective messaging, and mainstream social media strategies. It links everyday media practices (e.g. social media browsing) with emotionally charged symbolic registers (e.g. cuteness, care, pets), highlighting how affect-laden imagery become politically significant. This, in turn, can shed light on the mechanisms through which exclusionary ideologies affectively take root in the everyday social fabric. Keywords: Far Right; Normalisation; Animals; Affect; Cuteness; Visual Analysis