Giorgia Meloni in the spotlight. Mobilization and competition strategies in the 2022 Italian election campaign on Facebook

ABSTRACT

The 2022 Italian election campaign, taking place as it did in the middle of the summer following a government crisis, offered interesting suggestions concerning leaders’ and media strategies aimed at mobilizing people in a challenging context. Our results show that the ‘expected winner’, Giorgia Meloni, was able to focus the attention of leaders, the media and users on herself despite competing with leaders and parties (Matteo Salvini and the Five-star Movement) that were more established online. Although the competition took place in the context of an electoral system having a majoritarian component, Meloni’s main competitor, Democratic Party leader, Enrico Letta, does not seem to have been able to polarize the competition sufficiently due to the fragmentation of the parties of the centre-left. In contrast, ex-prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, and the leader of the third pole, Carlo Calenda, deployed contrasting but successful strategies on Facebook, ones that may have contributed to their electoral performances. In this context, the limited media attention devoted to the campaign seems to have mirrored citizens’ feelings of disaffection and distrust: feelings that were, in all probability, heightened by the incomprehensibility of the government crisis that led to the elections.

KEYWORDS:

• Election campaign
• Meloni
• party leaders
• polarization
• Facebook
• newspapers
• users’ reactions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23248823.2022.2150934

Notes

1. See SWG’s poll conducted from 21 to 28 July, on the website http://www.sondaggipoliticoelettorali.it/.

2. According to SWG’s poll, conducted from 21 to 28 July, 70% of respondents were negatively disposed towards the government’s demise, 61% towards the prospect of voting in September. See again the website http://www.sondaggipoliticoelettorali.it/.

3. As regards the effects of the electoral system on the 2018 campaign, see Chiaramonte and D’Alimonte (2018). See again Chiaramonte in this issue about the 2022 campaign.

4. We selected the leaders of parties that won at least 3% of the vote so gaining seats in Parliament (see https://elezioni.interno.gov.it/), while we used a two-fold criterion to select the newspapers on Facebook: circulation and political relevance in the public arena.

5. We selected Facebook because it is still the most widely used social media platform in Italy (see https://wearesocial.com/it/blog/2022/02/digital-2022-i-dati-italiani/), both for acquiring political information and for other purposes (Cornia 2022).

6. https://www.fieg.it/documentiitem.asp?page=1&docid=484.

7. Table A2 in the supplementary material. Data downloaded via CrowdTangle on 1 October 2022. Unfortunately, we cannot be sure if some posts have been deleted by newspapers.

8. After being labelled, the topics were included in thematic categories (Tables A3 and A4 in the supplementary material). To reach perfect agreement on classification, the team held several independent coding sessions and regular comparison meetings (Neuendorf 2019). See the supplementary material for further information.

9. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/giorgia-melonis-right-triumphs-italys-election-2022-09-26/.

10. See https://www.partitodemocratico.it/elezioni-politiche-2022/scegli-la-nuova-campagna-del-partito-democratico/.

11. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-italy-vote-idUKBRE91I0GF20130219.

12. Topics were identified separately for the two corpora (leaders and newspapers), so the formation of a cluster of posts dedicated to Meloni is very interesting because none of the leaders had enough posts focused on them to become a topic (see table A3 and A4 in the supplementary material).

13. Giorgia Meloni received a letter containing threats from the new Red Brigades during the election campaign https://thenationview.com/politics/94568.html.

14. Facebook algorithmically favours the visibility of popular content, which can be summarized by the formula the more interactions, the more circulation (Russmann et al. 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Antonio Martella

Antonio Martella is a research fellow at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society, University of Turin. His research focuses on political communication in social media and journalism and artificial intelligence through computational and statistical methods.

Franca Roncarolo

Franca Roncarolo is a Full Professor of Political Science at the University of Turin. Her research interests focus on the relationship between political leadership, public opinion and journalism, election campaigns, and the role of media in contemporary democracies.