Citizens as clients of the Institute of Politics: features of meme representation

The article presents the main results of a study of a thematic group of Internet memes posted on the German segment of the Internet (mainly on the platforms Reddit, kekememes, 9gag) aimed at criticizing German citizens as a political entity. The sample period is 2020-2025. The object of criticism is constituted by three subgroups: citizens in general in their attitude to politics, voters in general, and supporters of certain political parties. The occupancy rate of the relevant subgroups and interactive user reactions are evaluated. Internet memes are characterized by the subject of criticism, genetic, genre, structural, semantic (including features of semantic generation, sources of comedy, patterns of use of precedent phenomena, the ratio of verbal and visual series) characteristics. There is a tendency for memes to become more complex through genre hybridization. The specific characteristics of the meme representation of citizens as political actors in today's German meme culture are determined: the most active ironic criticism of supporters of specific political parties; the dominance of macros and comics, a lower frequency of parody memes, comparison memes and advices; high proportion of memes with hybrid genre stylistics; predominance of foreign cultural assimilated memes with wide targeting; appeal to current modern precedent phenomena; replication of the visual component and its refinement through the intracultural elements of the verbal component; the presence of images of living beings; the likening of the object of criticism to a recognizable character with expressive facial expressions and certain qualities; the transfer of everyday situations to the political sphere. The subject of criticism is infantilism, naivety, various fears, insufficient determination and confidence, excessive faith in participatory democracy.