The Romanian presidential elections in 2014 have witnessed a large turnout to polls, an unexpected result but also two successful key-propositions on the winning side, the candidate Klaus Iohannis: “After 25 years, let’s say stop and restart everything from the beginning” and “We’re going to take our country back”. While the first is an original output of the campaign staff after both a data analysis of the race and a catch-phrase proposal from the author of this paper, the second one has more international history behind it. From Michael Dukakis in 1988, to Howard Dean in 1993 and also the Tea Party Movement in 2009–2010 or Donald Trump in 2016, “take back our country” or “take back America” have reemerged as powerful messages in US politics1. More interesting, in recent years, the slogan has a polymorph and changing meaning in different international contexts: anti-immigration or anti-Muslims, anti-corporations, anti-elites or anti-politicians in general.
Phenomena in politics like ideology contamination from a country context to another, exporting international political consultants, pollsters or strategists from one democracy’s electoral campaigns to another’s or just following some sort of “fashions” in campaigning style have been a long presence in western-like democratic systems.
Yet, in the case of the 2014 message in Romania, there is more to the story than a simple copy-paste: a thin but visible new layer in understanding elections and public opinion. “Let’s take our country back” was at the moment in Romania more than a resurfaced message with a prior and ulterior tracking history, but also a descriptor for a wider spreading anti-establishment mood in societies and elections around the world. Eastern Europe alone provides other clarifying examples only the same year: Miro Cerar enters the national politics of Slovenia in 2014 and wins the parliamentary elections with his newly formed party after only one month; the ascension of Syriza in Greece and Beppe Grillo’s Five Stars Movement in Italy in the 2014 elections for the European Parliament; Andrej Kiska wins the presidential elections in Slovakia, in 2014, as an independent philanthropist. Even the presidential elections in Indonesia, in Asia, the same year, are showing a similar shift: a new face to national politics in a troubled new democracy, the mayor of a small city, Joko Widodo, becomes the winner. The new mentioned layer in politics and elections is about these spontaneous similarities in various national contexts regarding memes, ideologies, movements or agendas that are not the product of an individual-sustained effort, but a global contagion, taking place so fast even to the point of simultaneity, which is unique in history.
Why is it happening? Globalization has reached a deeper level in uniting societies, beyond the simple exchange of goods or movement of people. The globalization of information is changing how politics work within countries and between countries, and also trans-national. We live in a world where people around the planet, in distant countries, take part in a global conversation which is happening right now. The novelty of this phenomenon is simultaneity. Elections around the globe tend to have similar topics of conversation at the same moment.
We deal today with global consumers who are living more and more outside the national and local limitations: they look for information outside the local or national market; they spend money in a global market; they are affected in positive or negative ways by companies, goods and services from other countries; they perceive differences between working conditions or work payment in various countries; they are subject to both local, national and transnational policies regarding: medical services, pensions, social services, working, trade, travel etc. The consumer is impacted more than ever by trans-national phenomena like climate, wars and terrorism, economic collapses of business or countries, health scares, travel conditions or travel restrictions, natural disasters, exchange and stock exchange rates.
There is a deeper impact on psychological and social expectations: a rearrangement of what success or welfare is. Consumers and voters can now compare the quality of life of people in others countries or zones and may become frustrated or aspiring.
The overall result is a global mirroring of the “self” and a sort of global market for this transnational self, dealing with globalization of fears, emotions, expectations, needs or ideas.
If we think of national politics and elections as the equivalent of the two-dimensional space, the new global layer would be the third dimension. It is a total game changer since consumers and voters start to be affected or influenced in their daily preference or long term aspirations by the global information which is available everywhere at a very low cost or effort. Political parties’ programs or candidates’ platforms and national state’s social or economic outputs, not only companies, are challenged by transnational actors and events in the same manner. Even the simple presence in the national, local mass-media or social media by a political actor becomes more challenging as local news cycles get congested by the global events. Political organizations and leaders are forced to respond to un-regular events and issues that are part of a global agenda but where they don’t have the means or tools to affect these trends or events. This is a fast highway to the disruption of local and national politics.
The disruption and the dissonance of this kind push political organizations to abandon traditional rigid or ideological positions, to adapt to a richer and very unpredictable environment. Some very intuitive consequences are the dilution of ideologies or programs and the obsolescence of classical political party structures while the meaning of political interaction changes itself. Following this trend, political parties may become marginal as they cannot provide the same functions anymore.
Yet, at the same time, this global layer of politics opens the door for actors who strategize in a transnational manner, towards a transnational public, mostly states in international relations but also private actors, such as international organizations with various agendas.
The 3rd edition of the Political Marketing Forum in Bucharest, Romania, July 23–24, 2014, called for papers and presentations considering the theme: “Exchanging Political Value: Theory, Practice and Reporting of Political Marketing”. The purpose was to collect and discuss reports and contributions from scholars and practitioners about the shifts that are taking place in real world of elections and campaigns, or politics in general, around the world. One of the main findings illustrated in the selection of articles for the present issue was the development of this layer of global affairs within the realm of political marketing.
In “Putin’s International Political Image”, Greg Simons debates the connection between a leader like Vladimir Putin and an atypical audience – the American public and some of its segments who see in the leader “commonality and common interests”. The topic is a very challenging one considering the later political developments in US, especially in how elections can be effected by foreign actors.
Ieva Bērziņa considers a somewhat similar subject but in a different cultural and geographical context – Eastern Europe, about the “Weaponization of ‘Colour Revolutions’”. In this case, the relation between a state, Russia, and foreign audiences is not presumed to be passive, but on the contrary, an offensive one and an ideological counter-reaction to regime changes in its proximity. It is a good start point for the contemporary discussion regarding the means of intervention and propaganda by states in other societies, using globalized tools, beyond the now classical soft-power instruments.
Milena Drzewiecka and Wojciech Cwalina propose a conversion of a business leadership model to politics and they choose to make it using a test with a sample of voters from two nations, Poland and Georgia, in the article “Who Are the Political Leaders We Are Looking For? Candidate Positioning in Terms of Leadership Style. A Cross-cultural Empirical Study in Goleman’s Typology”. The research aims at defining a general trans-national leadership model for politics but also suggests a need to use global political brands, like Obama or Putin, as receptors or translators of emotions or political attitudes. It is impossible to understand today’s voters or consumers in the strict mental-borders of nations.
In “Partisan Schemata in Biased Interpretation of Electoral Proposals and Political Candidate Evaluation”, Andrzej Falkowski and Wojciech Cwalina show using an experiment that tolerance versus a party or politician is dependent on the political preference of the voter. The issue of tolerance is core to issues like democratic stability or acceptance of other groups in modern, globalized societies (e.g., immigrants, sexual minorities, ethnic groups).
Later events like the disruption of European politics by migration fluxes and terrorism, the scandals around the Russian meddling into the US 2016 elections on many levels, the wave of illiberal ideas and politicians rising at once in elections – mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, but not only –, the fake-news phenomenon, anti-vaccination or anti-Soros campaigns, the cyber wars and cyber criminals disrupting the daily activities around the globe or the emergence of crypto currencies as trans-national economics have presented more evidence about the validity of the topic of this issue. The way value is exchanged in contemporary societies has gone more complex and should change how political marketing is dealing with the relation voter-political organization, while the two sides of the dyad tend to be transformed by the new global layer.