Inventing an alternative: Populist imaginations of political leaders in audiovisual culture

This working paper examines how contemporary European television series create alternative visions of political leadership in response to democratic crisis and public disillusionment with elites. Drawing on empirical media aesthetics and political theory, and within the Horizon Europe project MORES – Moral Emotions in Politics, we analyse the recurring trope of “democratic just anger” across three series: SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE (Ukraine), REPRESENT (France), and THE AMAZING MRS PRITCHARD (UK). Each features protagonists who rise from underrepresented social groups and channel moral emotions (particularly anger) into transformative political action. Using multimodal film analysis, we demonstrate how these series create affect dramaturgies that model different populisms, challenging both elite governance and exclusionary nationalist ideologies. We argue that these fictional representations serve not merely as mirrors of real-world populist movements but as experimental “populism laboratories” that explore the alignment of populist thought patterns with liberal democratic values. In doing so, the series reflect and shape contemporary political culture by staging the emotional labour of public educators, and by depicting politics as a site of moral struggle, collective imagination, and affective engagement.