Breakneck Brexit: Engaging with political storytelling in live professiona wrestling

The performance of politics in professional wrestling offers a distinctive example of political and cultural engagement taking place at the same time in the live theatre of sports entertainment. This chapter explores the work of professional wrestlers in political storytelling. It takes as its focus Swedish wrestling, with storylines that mine the rise of populism and anti-immigration discourses in Europe. Through qualitative interviews and observations at live matches, my research analyses the way professional wrestlers build engagement profiles, inviting audiences to connect politically and emotionally with the performance of wrestling as part of a broader narrative of populism in Europe, in particular Brexit. By crafting characters as elite politicians or migrant workers, with a backstory of right-wing parties and political power, these wrestlers shape ways of engaging their audiences and fans with a visual representation of real-world politics. At a time when politics feels intractable—for example, the coalition government in Sweden, or Brexit negotiations in Europe— the local space of Swedish wrestling enacts an alternative story of swift action, where good triumphs over evil. The engagement profiles of these wrestlers and their performances in live matches offer clear invitations to their audience to engage negatively with populism and right-wing extremism, and to engage positively with liberal democracy and social justice. Political storytelling in professional wrestling can, in this way, be seen to shape a raw form of emotional and physical engagement with an imagined reality where Brexit is beaten, and power-hungry politicians are forced into submission.