Political communication strategies on social media are filled with alarming right-wing extremist rhetoric that incites hatred against women (Caldeira & Machado, 2023). Around the globe, we witnessed cases that denounce this issue as a problem for democracy (Krook, 2017), and we are urged to consider emerging responses from different spheres of society. In Portugal, this phenomenon is reflected in the Chega party, which was established as the third national political force and won 9.9% of the vote in the 2024 European elections (European Parliament, 2024). Not surprisingly, André Ventura, leader of the far-right Portuguese party, has used digital platforms to expand his presence among younger voters in recent years (Vieira & Joaquim, 2023). In academic research purposes, gender is not seen as a central issue in political communication, although the far-right carries the mark of gender in its discourse. We bring gender issues to the centre of discussion to avoid what scholars in the news media field of research frequently neglect. We assume that political issues are not separate from gender in a discursive strategy which tends to contribute to the erosion of democratic public space through the promotion of symbolic violence and misogyny. In this communication, we examine how the country's main far-right figure frames women and feminism on his TikTok profile. We examine his posts from a political and feminist perspective, taking into account how ideologies are spread through public-sphere discourses. The research is designed using a qualitative approach following a critical feminist discourse perspective (Lazar, 2018) on data analysis. The corpus consists of 164 posts from Ventura’s TikTok profile. The data set includes 24 videos that mention and/or show actions by women and about women between March 1 and August 31, 2024. The six-month data collection period considers the three months before and the three months following the European Parliament elections. Three critical themes emerged: Femonationalism and strategic instrumentalisation, Gender as a floating signifier in political conflict, and Political gender violence and performances of masculinity. Therefore, we discuss how far-right populism instrumentalises gender and feminist topics to promote ideas of exclusion. Extremist discourses feed on violence against women politicians to silence these dissenting feminist voices while building, behind digital performances of masculinity, a national identity that excludes this ‘other’. Gender is a fluid mechanism, a resource that is always available to be shaped according to the political conflict of the moment. We argue that gender is not a marginal aspect of the far-right wing discursive strategies, but a central mechanism to normalise extremist ideologies. Women's rights issues are either exploited for xenophobic purposes or revived for use in a conservative context where family and traditions are valued, and women have a fixed place within this revived past.

This work is funded by national funds through the FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., within the scope of project UID/06303/2025.

democracy,hate speech,far-right wing,anti-feminist discourse,anti-gender discourse

• Media and Communications - Social Sciences