Why populists adore cats – and use them in their political propaganda

Italy’s rightwing deputy prime minister is using cat pictures to soften his anti-migrant posts on Facebook. This is no surprise. The whitewashed cats of the internet are pure phoneys

Fans of Matteo Salvini, Italy’s rightwing, populist deputy prime minister, have been sending him images of their cats so he can post the cute, furry faces on his Facebook page and give his relentless attacks on migrants a more cuddly setting. Yet the idea that cat pictures are sweet is an internet-era development. In art, until recently, the cat was an evil creature.

It is positively diabolical in Renaissance images of witchcraft. The German artist Hans Baldung Grien regularly included cats in his drawings of witches cavorting naked. While his witches offer themselves to Satan, their feline familiars, nicely observed, sit enigmatically, as cats will. In fact, 500 years ago, cats were considered so malign they were sometimes sealed alive inside wattle-and-daub walls.

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