Lived Populism: Mainstream Social Media and the Resurgence of the Far Right in Portugal and Spain

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Universiteit van Amsterdam

Lived Populism: Mainstream Social Media and the

Resurgence of the Far Right in Portugal and Spain

MA Thesis

Programme: New Media and Digital Culture

Vânia Raquel Leonardo Ferreira

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Acknowledgements

This thesis is the culmination of a special journey, and I want to express my gratitude to all around me who contributed to make it possible, in particular to Bernhard Rieder, for the lively and inspirational supervision of this work; and to my colleagues and friends, especially to Marta. I am most indebted to my family and to my partner, who nourished me with love and encouragement.

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Abstract

Populist right-wing political actors have been succeeding in gaining power, at various levels, in liberal democracies across Europe and beyond. Spain and Portugal stood as the ‘exception’ in Europe until recently, losing this status in 2019 when far right-wing Spanish political party VOX and Portuguese Chega entered the respective national parliaments. Considering this recent change, these cases constitute an opportunity to empirically investigate the interplay between populism and social media, responding to the need for country and cross-platform research. This study investigates VOX and Chega and their leader’s use of four main social media platforms–Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube–and how they succeed, attending to the interplay between populism, as a political style, and the platforms’ vernaculars, resorting to digital methods for the data collection and analysis, within a mixed-methods analytical approach. The findings show that the political actors’ populist performances succeed within an adaptation to the platforms, as populism is lived through the platforms’ vernaculars, showing the influential role of these platforms.

Keywords

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Introduction

Populist right-wing political actors have been succeeding in gaining power, at various levels, in liberal democracies across Europe and beyond, such as in Germany, Italy, or Brazil. Like with Trump, social media has been an important channel within their political communication strategy. Portugal and Spain stood as the ‘exception’ in Europe until recently, losing this status in 2019 when far right-wing Spanish political party VOX and Portuguese Chega entered the respective national parliaments. As social media has been conceived as conducive to populism (Gerbaudo), the end of the Iberian ‘exceptionalism’ constitutes an opportunity to empirically investigate the interplay between populism and social media.

Although digital campaigns have been extensively studied, comparative studies taking a cross-country and multi-platform approach are still underdeveloped, to some extent owing to access limitations imposed by social media corporations, and to the growing complexity deriving from the platforms’ ever-evolving affordances, complicating the pursuit of comparative studies. However, as political actors do not operate in isolation in the current hybrid media system (Chadwick), this study responds to the need for country and cross-platform research (De Vreese et al.; Engesser, Ernst, et al.; Serrano et al.).

Along these lines, this paper investigates VOX and Chega and their leader’s use of four mainstream social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube – and how they succeed, attending to the interplay between populism and the platforms’ vernaculars. The methodological outlook is based on digital methods (Rogers, Digital Methods) following the medium for the collection and analysis of natively digital artefacts, in the case of this study each party and leader’s posts as issued from their public accounts, in the pre- and post-election periods of the latest general election. This allows to find similarities and differences and understand implications in two planes: between party and leader, as the leader is often the focus of discussion about populism, accounting for concerted campaigning endeavours; and between periods, to account for variation before and after securing electoral success.

The most engaged-with posts were selected, in which case each platforms’ engagement measures were considered, as provided in the collected data. The content of the posts is analysed within a mixed-methods approach, to trace both populist and platformisation tendencies: in the first case, I take populism as a style of doing politics whose three key elements are the ‘appeal to ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’; ‘bad manners’; and crisis, breakdown or threat’ (Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism 38, emphasis in original). To trace platformisation tendencies, I focus on identifying the ways in which the parties and the leaders

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adapt their messages to the platforms’ vernaculars (Gibbs et al.; Meese et al.). The findings show that the political actors’ populist performances succeed within an adaptation to the platforms, as populism is lived through the platforms’ vernaculars, showing the influential role of these platforms.

This paper unfolds as follows: the opening chapter provides the theoretical foundations, addressing populism, social media and electoral campaigning, and platform vernaculars. The second chapter pertains to the methodology: I contextualise the case studies, and the data collection and analysis. The third chapter encompasses the findings, followed by the fourth and last chapter, in which a cross-country and cross-platform analysis and discussion is presented.

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1. Theoretical framework

This chapter includes three sections: the first section pertains to populism and the different approaches in its study, contextualising the approach chosen in this work and previous research on populism and social media; in the second section, social media and electoral campaigning are addressed; and the third section pertains to platform vernaculars, contextualising social media platforms as sociotechnical environments.

1.1 Populism

Figure 1. Google Trends results for the term populism1

Populism has been trending in the past years, especially in relation to the 2016 presidential elections in the U.S., from which Donald Trump arose as the 45th President of the country. Although the media and academia have been increasingly devoting attention to populism, academic research on the phenomenon dates back to the late 1960s, with Ionescu and Gellner pioneering in the identification of populist manifestations across different continents (Ionescu and Gellner). Some historical examples of populism have been identified in the late nineteenth century, with the cases of the People’s Party in the U.S. defending agrarian interests; the Russian revolutionary intellectuals narodniki who, idealising the Russian peasants, advocated

1

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for a political model based on the village commune (Müller 19); or Boulangism, in France, with its nationalist call for plebiscitary republicanism as a counter to the people-estranging parliamentary regime (Rovira Kaltwasser et al. 19). Appealing to ‘the people’, the virtuous or disadvantaged, and opposing the establishment were common denominators to these cases. More recent manifestations of populism include the Tea Party social movement in the U.S. (Hawkins and Kaltwasser 11); or the Italian MoVimento Cinque Stelle and the Spanish Podemos, as examples of the evolution from social movements to party politics (Chadwick and Stromer-Galley 289).

Populism has been theorised from different perspectives. Weyland defines populism as a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exerts power, based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalised support from large numbers of people (Weyland). Political scientist Cas Mudde conceptualises populism as a ‘thin-centred ideology’ for its limited range of political concepts, as such being easily combined with other thin or full ideologies such as nationalism (Mudde). Political theorist and philosopher Ernesto Laclau has defined populism as a political logic since ‘the people’ is the subject of the political, a ‘people’ that is not pre-existent but rather discursively constituted against those in power (Laclau). These three approaches to populism – strategic, ideational, and discursive-performative – acknowledge the divide between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, and recognise the role of the populist leader, with their differences mainly pertaining to whether populism is a binary or gradational phenomenon, and whether it is an attribute or a practice (Moffitt, Populists Without Borders).

In this work, I adopt Benjamin Moffitt’s approach to populism as a political style, within the broader discursive-performative approach. In his 2016 book The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation, the author conceptualises populism as a political style, a style of doing politics, whose three key elements are the “appeal to ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’; ‘bad manners’; and ‘crisis, breakdown or threat” (Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism 38, emphasis in original). Within this perspective, the populist leader appears as both ordinary and extraordinary, in the sense of being part of ‘the people’, whilst simultaneously embodying ‘the people’. In this sense, authenticity, often based on a disregard for appropriateness (‘bad manners’), is important to establish the populist leaders’ distance from the politically correct, rational elites, and thereby their legitimacy. Furthermore, the author sees the performance of crisis as intrinsic to the populist style, in which failure is elevated to crisis and based on the division between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’(The Global Rise of Populism 125). Furthermore, in the performance of crisis particular ‘others’ are often targeted as enemies of ‘the people’, such as minorities, immigrants, or asylum seekers (The

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Global Rise of Populism 52), beside the polarisation fostered by the dichotomy between ‘the people’ and the ‘elites’.

Moffit asserts that populism can manifest across the political spectrum and present tensions between democratic tendencies, in the case of liberal-democratic societies often reacting against the liberal pillar in matters such as the protection of minorities and the safeguard of checks and balances. The author thus notes that considering populism as a political style requires embracing nuanced gradation, in the sense that variations may occur across contexts and over time, particularly along the spectrum that opposes the populist political style to the technocratic political style (The Global Rise of Populism 55).

Moffitt also highlights the role of media in the creation, distribution and promotion of the populist performances, taking into account how the populist style aligns with aspects of the media logic such as polarisation, stereotypisation, emotionalisation or intensification (The Global Rise of Populism 82–83), and with social media’s immediacy, antagonistic culture and vernacular modes of expression (The Global Rise of Populism 98).

The interplay between populism and media has been researched considering various channels and different approaches. Jagers and Walgrave, approaching populism as a political communication style, empirically studied six Belgian political parties and their broadcasts through a comparative discourse analysis, concluding that the extreme-right party Vlaams Blok exhibited a more populist communication style (Jagers and Walgrave). Cranmer analysed immigration-related speeches of Swiss politicians from parties across the political spectrum, finding variations in the influence of the setting on party populist communication, with right-wing Swiss People’s Party politicians employing a more populist style of communication in a televised talk show than during parliamentary sessions (Cranmer).

With the increasing use of social media by politicians, scholars have also conducted empirical research to study populism and social media. Bobba analysed the Italian far right-wing party Lega Nord and its leader Matteo Salvini on Facebook, finding that populism, emotionalisation, and the role of the leader positively affect the ‘likeability’ of a message (Bobba). Larsson conducted a longitudinal study of Swedish elections on Facebook, whose findings uncovered the increasing prominence of Facebook in online political campaigning, and revealed that right-wing political parties achieved higher engagement by providing populistic content in a platform-adapted fashion (Larsson). Ernst, Engesser, and Esser studied Swiss parties on Facebook and Twitter focusing on two dimensions of populism–people-centrism and anti-elitism–finding that parties at both ends of the political spectrum have a greater tendency for populist communication, and that the left-wing parties emphasised an

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advocative people-centrism, whilst the right-wing parties tendentially focused on anti-elitism in a more conflictive style (Ernst, Engesser, and Esser).

Addressing the need for research adopting a cross-country and cross-platform approach in the study of populism and social media, Engesser et al. focused on five traits of populist ideology–emphasising the sovereignty of the people, advocating for the people, attacking the elites, ostracising others, and invoking the ‘heartland’–and applied a qualitative text analysis to Facebook and Twitter posts by politicians from Austria, Switzerland, Italy and the United Kingdom (Engesser, Ernst, et al.). The findings demonstrate political actors’ freedom in articulating and spreading their populist ideology on these platforms, an ideology that nevertheless manifests in a fragmented form, with variations across the political spectrum: whilst left-wing politicians attack the economic elite, attacks to the media elite and ostracism of others are more common among right-wing political actors.

Ernst et al. have detected fragmentation as well, in their country and cross-platform research. The authors conducted a semi-automated content analysis of Facebook and Twitter posts by parties across the left-right spectrum from Switzerland, Germany, the United Kingdom, the U.S., and France, whose results have shown that populism is mostly observed at both extremes of the political spectrum, especially on the right; by opposition parties, advocating for the people by attacking and discrediting the political elite; and mostly on Facebook rather than on Twitter, which the authors attribute to Facebook’s higher levels of proximity and reciprocity, less limitations in space for messages, and its non-elitist ethos. (Ernst, Engesser, Büchel, et al.).

Lastly, whilst Engesser, Fawzi, et al. identify the interplay between the populist communication logic and online opportunity structures across four dimensions, as shown in figure 2 (Engesser, Fawzi, et al. 1282), Baldwin-Philippi further argues that, beyond the online opportunity structures identified by Engesser, Fawzi, et al., digital media’s materiality is constitutive of populism in that the affordances and practices that exist within the platforms as well as those of the platforms extend the repertoire of practices and influence the performance of populism (Baldwin-Philippi, ‘The Technological Performance of Populism’).

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Figure 2 Interplay of populist communication logic and online opportunity structures

(Source: Engesser, Fawzi, et al. 1282)

Along these lines, in this study it is expected that the studied right-wing political actors adopt the populist style, and that social media facilitates their performance at different levels.

The next section focuses on electoral campaigning on social media.

1.2 Social media and electoral campaigning

Figure 3. Number of people using social media platforms worldwide

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Social media has been increasingly reinforcing its place in society. In the political sphere, social media platforms are established as a fundamental channel for political campaigning, especially in electoral moments, with Barack Obama’s 2008 U.S. presidential campaign as a paradigmatic case of successful online campaigning, capitalising on new modes of reaching citizens, attracting attention and channelling participation and support among wider and networked audiences (Baldwin-Philippi, ‘Politics 2.0’).

Political actors are able to enter these platforms’ public spaces without facing barriers and at virtually no cost, where professional norms and values of traditional mass media do not apply (Engesser, Ernst, et al. 1110), thereby being able to bypass a possible cordon sanitaire. Reach and persuasion are facilitated by social media’s networked structure, immediacy, ‘closeness’ and participatory ethos, and the imbued seamlessness and intuitive use enable political actors to easily build and run campaigns. With these platforms’ ever-evolving affordances–aiming at retaining, diversifying and growing their user bases, in line with their commercial interests–political actors can benefit from mechanisms that allow for measurement of success, including paid services with more sophisticated analytics and microtargeting opportunities. On the other hand, legitimacy can be achieved through the popularity mechanisms of the ‘social media logic’ (Van Dijck and Poell), materialised in ‘likes’ and ‘views’, that take an active role in creating reality and thus are also performative (Burgess and Green 46).

Within the current hybrid media system, these mechanisms are also important to attract traditional media’s attention, particularly important for newcomers who have yet to succeed in the political arena. In this hybrid media system, brought about by the evolution of communication technologies that reshaped media and politics, old and new media co-exist and intermingle, within a constellation of acting forces and shifting power relations (Chadwick). Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign exemplifies this hybridity. Alongside data-driven strategies and Facebook advertising (351), Trump’s caustic and highly engaged-with populist performance on Twitter, fitting the antagonistic culture of social media, secured traditional media’s coverage, altogether contributing to the amplification of his propaganda. Furthermore, traditional media, once the agenda-setting gatekeepers, have also adjusted to Trump’s headline-grabbing behaviour (Karpf), in line with the transformations fostered by digital media, such as the acceleration of news cycles (Chadwick 356) and the intensification of competition in securing the publics’ attention and advertising revenue (Jungherr et al.). On the other hand, Benkler et al. pointed out to a right-wing media network seeking to influence public discourse by disseminating propaganda online, anchored around Breitbart and in cooperation with

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traditional media through Fox News (Benkler et al.). Wooley and Howard further address these dynamics in what they define as computational propaganda, ‘the assemblage of social media platforms, autonomous agents, and big data’ (Woolley and Howard 185), involving algorithms, automation and human curation, directed at disseminating deceptive content and at amplifying or repressing political messages, during the presidential election race. Along these lines, as geographies become blurred, international coordination is also facilitated, allowing for operations such as American Trump supporters assisting in amplifying French far-right politician Marine Le Pen’s messages via ‘likes’ and comments (Hendrickson and Galston).

Although hybridity is not the focus of this work, it nevertheless is acknowledged that such dynamics are influential, as social media particularly constitutes an opportunity structure to populist political actors aiming at polarising and manipulating public opinion in order to achieve electoral success. In the next section, the vernaculars of these sociotechnical environments are further discussed.

1.3 Platform vernaculars

The sociotechnical and cultural dynamics of social media environments can either enable or constrain participation and visibility, thereby influencing the eb and flow of political activity. The platforms’ vernaculars encompass conventions, grammars and logics constituted by affordances and mediated performances that are co-shaped and that co-evolve through design, appropriation and use (Gibbs et al.; Meese et al.). Activity is organised and curated within a relational dynamics, in which users’ agency is also generative of the system, given the machine learning feedback-loops (Bucher and Helmond 28), thereby integrating a set of forces mutually shaping meaning and modulating behaviour (Cheney-Lippold). Accordingly, platforms ‘encourage’ users to stay (Davis and Chouinard 243, my emphasis). In this vein, part of the vernaculars is also the logic of the platforms’ business models, extending themselves into the web (Helmond) and repurposing and commodifying data, as they operate within multisided market configurations steered by network effects (Nieborg and Poell 4277–78). Along these lines, these corporations assume different roles before other media actors, users, clients, advertisers, and policymakers, shifting from populist appeals to the common citizen, to signalling their potential in connecting and targeting publics (Gillespie, ‘The Politics of “Platforms”’). In this regard, political actors will have to position themselves in face of this logic.

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Moreover, platforms’ digital architectures grammatise both production, access and engagement, in that:

[n]etwork structure influences how users identify and connect with political accounts. Functionality governs the rules of media production and diffusion across a platform. Algorithmic filtering determines what content users are exposed to, and datafication provides the means for politicians to target voters outside of their existing subscribers.

(Bossetta 475)

Thus, whilst Facebook affords multiple modes of engagement, such as a range of quantifiable and emotionalised buttons and ‘stickers’, Twitter encompasses a more open network structure facilitating content to surface outside one’s follower base; Instagram is tailored to photo and video-sharing; and YouTube’s algorithm filters and ranks search results and recommendation streams, involving parameters such as newness, popularity (views), uploading frequency, engagement, session time, negative feedback, metadata, and subscriber base and notifications, entailing a fine filigree of mutually constitutive agencies (Rieder et al. 65). Furthermore, platform interoperability influences the dissemination of content, and mediators such as the hashtag can be(come) relevant in advancing particular issues and improving searchability.

In this sense, political actors ought to account for each platform’s mise-en-scène, particularly:

the technical resources that make it easier to circulate some kinds of content than others, the economic structures that support or restrict circulation, the attributes of a media text that might appeal to a community’s motivation for sharing material, and the social networks that link people through the exchange of meaningful bytes. (Jenkins et al. 4)

Part of the equation are then aspects such as appealing to “affective publics” (Papacharissi); memetic value; the materially productive act of pushing ‘retweet’, even if users do not necessarily share the expectations encapsulated in the post, and replicability affordances (boyd 7) enabling circulation. Moreover, the cultures within each platform invite, facilitate or exacerbate existing tendencies, of which satirical and ambivalent play (Phillips and Milner 50) is an example.

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2. Methodology

In this chapter, an initial section provides the contextualisation of the case studies, which is followed by the data collection and analysis framework. In the third section, a preliminary analysis of the collected data is presented.

2.1 Case studies 2.1.1 Portugal

Chega (henceforth CH) is a Portuguese far right-wing party, officially established in April 2019. Its leader, André Ventura, was elected to the Assembly of the Republic, the 230-member unicameral parliament, in Portugal’s most recent parliamentary election, held in October 2019. CH defines itself as a party focused in the nation, conservative, liberal and personalist (‘Manifesto’). Some of the party’s main programmatic measures pertain to the reduction of the number of members of parliament (MP), abolishment of the role of prime minister, to be accumulated by the president of the republic, and the introduction of life imprisonment for serious crimes and of chemical castration of sexual offenders. In July 2020, CH joined Identity and Democracy, the far-right political group of the European Parliament, of which Salvini’s Lega and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally are part.

André Ventura, CH’s only MP, is a Doctor in Law who served as professor in Portuguese universities, worked in law firms, and in public administration as a tax inspector. Moreover, Ventura has also been a consultant with an accounting and tax firm, and a crime and football commentator on traditional media (television, newspaper). Prior to CH, Ventura had been a member of the centre-right Social Democratic Party (PSD) for several years, the second largest party in Portugal, which he left in 2018 to co-found CH. Ventura held functions as a PSD-elected city councillor, whose 2017 candidacy was marked by his racist discourse against the Romani. Prior to running for the 2019 Portuguese general election, Ventura had run for the 2019 European Parliament election as head of a right-wing coalition, without succeeding. In February 2020 Ventura officially announced his candidacy to the 2021 Portuguese presidential election.

The current four-year legislature comprises ten parties in parliament, with the socialist António Costa as Prime Minister, who maintained incumbency, now outside a left-leaning

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agreement, but also without achieving an absolute majority. CH is now one of the parties in opposition.

Following the 2019 report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in partnership with ISCTE-IUL University Institute of Lisbon (Newman et al. 102–03), based on a resident population of approximately ten million, internet penetration totalled 78% in Portugal. Television (81%) and online sources (79%, including social media) were the most used to access news, with social media alone securing 57%. In terms of social media and messaging services, the five most used for any purpose were Facebook (77%), YouTube (70%), Facebook Messenger (61%), WhatsApp (47%), and Instagram (40%).

In the same year, the National Institute of Statistics reported that 76,2% of the resident population within the 16-74 age group used the internet, with four out of every five internet users participating in social media networks (Instituto Nacional de Estatística - Statistics Portugal).

In the ‘Digital 2020: Portugal’ report from Datareportal.com, a website with aggregated information mostly from marketing-related sources, social media penetration was at 69% in January 2020 (Kemp, ‘Digital 2020’). On the same report, considering internet users aged 16 to 64 years old, YouTube appears as the most used (93%), followed by Facebook (86%), Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp (both with 73%), Instagram (68%), Pinterest and Twitter (both with 38%), all of them comprising the top seven sites. Moreover, internet users within the 16-64 age group spent over six hours on the internet, and a little over two hours on social media, both on a daily basis. The percentage of active social media users accessing via mobile was at 97%.

Furthermore, research has shown that Portuguese parties and politicians are increasingly active on social media. Political actors tend to privilege Facebook, considering the opportunity to reach a broader electorate; Instagram is also prominent, appealing to a younger electorate; Twitter is less widespread, but is used by politicians and journalists; and WhatsApp has been gaining relevance (Expresso).

Indeed, at the time of this analysis, CH had accounts on some of the most prominent platforms in the country, namely Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, alongside with an official website and the use of messaging service WhatsApp. André Ventura had accounts on all platforms except YouTube, albeit his Instagram account having only been created in January 2020, thus falling out of the scope of this study. Although table 1 does not reflect the period of time around the 2019 general election, it nevertheless offers an overview of both the party and the leader’s (increasing) follower count per platform. Based on this overview, the

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prominence of Facebook for both CH and Ventura aligns with the tendencies of the Portuguese political sphere, and with Facebook’s significant use among the citizenry.

Table 1. Follower bases as of 25 March 2020

CH André Ventura

Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube Nr. of followers/ subscribers 101,251 8,557 13,200 45,100 85,018 13,400 4,274 --- Nr. of page likes 92,010 --- --- --- 80,725 --- --- --- 2.1.2 Spain

VOX was established in December 2013. Santiago Abascal, a Sociology undergraduate, who served as a People’s Party (PP) representative in the Basque regional parliament, left PP to co-found VOX. Shortly after VOX’s foundation, Abascal became the party’s president, in 2014. VOX’s ideology is grounded in nationalism, nativism, authoritarianism and conservatism (Turnbull-Dugarte), and VOX firmly rejects Spain’s current system of devolved regional powers, defending the suppression of regional autonomies and the recentralisation of the Spanish state.

In 2019, political instability led to two general elections, derived from the mid-2018 no-confidence vote ousting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy (PP) from office, after which Pedro Sánchez (Spanish Socialist Workers Party, PSOE) became premier. In December 2018, VOX had secured its first electoral success at the regional level, winning 12 of the 109 seats in Andalusia’s assembly. In April 2019, VOX entered national parliament, securing 24 seats, integrating the opposition; and in November 2019 that number rose to 52 (and three senators)2, with VOX becoming the third political force, after PSOE and PP. With PSOE falling short of a majority in November 2019, a left-leaning coalition was agreed between Pedro Sánchez and Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, with Sánchez as the President of the Government.

2

The Spanish bicameral parliament, the Cortes Generales, comprises the Senate (upper house) and the Congress of Deputies (lower house, with 350 members).

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According to research conducted by the University of Navarra for the aforementioned 2019 Reuters Institute report (Newman et al. 108–09), in Spain internet penetration was at 93%, considering a resident population of approximately 46 million. From the study resulted that online sources (including social media) and television were the most used to access news–80% and 72% respectively–with social media alone achieving 53%. As for social media and messaging services, the most used for any purpose were WhatsApp (78%), Facebook (73%), YouTube (68%), Instagram (38%), Twitter (29%), and Facebook Messenger (27%).

The account of Datareportal.com for Spain, in ‘Digital 2020: Spain’, estimated 29 million active social media users (62%) as of January 2020 (Kemp, ‘Digital 2020’). Regarding the most used social media and messaging services for internet users of the 16-64 age group, the top six listed were YouTube (89%), WhatsApp (86%), Facebook (79%), Instagram (65%), Twitter (53%), and Facebook Messenger (46%). Furthermore, the population of internet users aged 16 to 64 spent close to six hours on the internet, and nearly two hours on social media, on a daily basis. The percentage of active social media users accessing via mobile was at 98%.

Spanish politicians have been active on social media, especially on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the latter gaining prominence in recent years among younger generations, being dominated by VOX and in which the party also finds its largest follower base, as of April 2019 (Oelsner).

At the time of this analysis, VOX announced on its website to have accounts on some of the most used platforms in Spain–Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube–and also on Flickr, Gab, TikTok and Telegram. Santiago Abascal only linked to his Twitter account from his personal website, although he also has accounts on Facebook and Instagram. Despite not reflecting the situation during the studied pre- and post-electoral periods, table 2 offers an overview of the (increasing) follower bases.

Table 2. Follower bases as of 25 March 2020

VOX Santiago Abascal

Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube

Nr. of followers/ subscribers 479,844 395,000 524,000 268,000 316,512 396,000 599,000 --- Nr. of page likes 395,117 --- --- --- 260,778 --- --- ---

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Indeed, these cases encompass a wealth of similarities and differences that benefit a comparative study. On the one hand, considering the widespread use of social media in both countries, especially in regards to mainstream platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, the chosen platforms for this study; the countries’ transition to democracy in the mid-1970s after the end of decades-long dictatorial regimes; the ideological alignment between parties, broadly considered; and both countries’ incumbent left-wing governments at the time of the latest general election, and thereafter. On the other hand, as liberal democracies with differences in terms of systems of government: Spain as a decentralised unitary state within a constitutional monarchy, and Portugal as an unitary semi-presidential republic; and also regarding the longer existence of VOX and its more established presence on social media, as well as its earlier entry in national parliament, in April 2019.

It is also worth noting both leaders’ dissidence from the respective mainstream conservative parties, which, therefore, does not position them as outsiders: even though their roles had not been at the national level, they were experienced politicians starting their own right-wing projects.

2.2 Digital methods

The methodological outlook of this paper is based on digital methods, to study society with the web with a focus on natively digital objects (Rogers, Digital Methods). Digital methods are an assemblage of research practices, techniques and tools embedded in online devices, and as such follow and evolve with the medium. In that sense, this research framework asks for the consideration of the instability of online artefacts, particularly in terms of the flow of interactions and the contingencies related to limitations imposed by the platforms in accessing their Application Programming Interface (API) (Rogers, Doing Digital Methods). In the case of social media, research does often rely on APIs, as is the case of this study, therefore this layer of contingency is inherent, as are the epistemological propositions of the software tools for data collection and analysis which build on these APIs (Rieder and Röhle 77). On the other hand, as the collection of data occurred after the periods under scrutiny in this study, the data are taken as a series of ‘snapshots’ to allow to understand these political actors’ use of the considered social media platforms and how they succeed.

Several software tools were utilised for data collection and analysis. In the case of Facebook, I resorted to Facepager, an application for automated data retrieval on the web,

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specifically the Facebook module via the Graph API version 3.2 (Jünger and Keyling). In regards to Twitter data, I utilised the software Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset from the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI-TCAT), that repurposes Twitter’s REST API for research (Borra and Rieder). For Instagram, both Instaloader (Graf and Koch-Kramer) and Instagram Scraper (Digital Methods Initiative) were utilised. In regards to YouTube channels, I resorted to the software YouTube Data Tools (Rieder, YouTube Data Tools), which interfaces with YouTube API v3. As only public accounts were scraped, permission has not been formally requested to the considered political actors. The collected metadata corresponded to posts issued by the political actors on the feeds/channels of their public accounts, excluding private messages; and information about users engaging with the posts was not included. On the other hand, as screenshots of the material are provided for illustration, the privacy of citizens depicted/interacting with the posts has been accounted for, which means that some screenshots have been accordingly edited to prevent possible identification (in such occasions an indication is provided). Moreover, other software applications were utilised, when applicable, providing insight into presence and relevance of specific elements: word clouds with hashtags, through the application d3-cloud (Davies); and the software Textanalysis (Rieder, Textanalysis) for emoji, and bigrams, i.e., pairs of words co-occurring frequently.

The analytical strategy is based on a mixed-methods approach to the most engaged-with posts for the selected periods: the pre-election period, considered the month leading to the election, including the day of the election itself; and the post-election period, one month after the election. With much attention currently being devoted to populist leaders, in this study both parties and leaders are considered. For the selection of these posts, each platform’s specific engagement measures were taken into account, however acknowledging, on the one hand, that the extent to which the posts have been equally visible cannot be known (Rogers, ‘Digital Methods for Cross-Platform Analysis’ 10); and, on the other hand, the imbued ambiguity in regards to participation, which, nevertheless, is productive,

[a]fter all, the more engagement a story generates, the more likely it is to live on through the circulation and transformation underscoring online interaction; content spreads memetically whether participants share something to signal support, disgust, or anything on the spectrum in between. (Phillips and Milner 54)

Therefore, in the case of Facebook, comments, shares and (aggregated) reactions were taken into account; for Twitter, the count of likes and retweets were considered; in the case of

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Instagram, likes and comments were chosen; and for YouTube the count of views was selected. In the latter two cases, specific dissemination metrics (‘shares’) were not considered due to access limitations. In the Findings chapter, further details are provided in each corresponding section. Overall, this strategy allows to find similarities and differences and understand implications in two planes: between party and leader, accounting for concerted campaigning endeavours; and between periods, to account for variation before and after securing electoral success. The content of the most engaged-with posts is analysed to trace both populist and platformisation tendencies: in the first case, I take populism as a style of doing politics whose three key elements are the ‘appeal to ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’; ‘bad manners’; and crisis, breakdown or threat’ (Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism 38, emphasis in original). To trace platformisation tendencies, I focus on identifying the ways in which the parties and the leaders adapt their messages to the platforms’ vernaculars (Gibbs et al.; Meese et al.).

In the next section, the results of the data collection are presented, and a preliminary analysis is provided.

2.3 Data

Table 3. Total number of collected posts per actor and per platform Actors CH André Ventura VOX Santiago Abascal Period (dd/mm/yyyy) 06/09/2019 - 06/11/2019 (general election: 6 October 2019)

10/10/2019 - 10/12/2019

(general election: 10 November 2019)

Facebook Nr. of collected posts 206 125 118 203 Twitter 152 22 1,780 851 Instagram 161 ---3 ₁₄₁ ₁₃₃ YouTube 13 ---4 ₁₀₄ _---5

3_{André Ventura started posting on Instagram in late January 2020, therefore his Instagram activity has not been}

considered since it falls out of the timeframe set for this study.

4_{At the time of the data collection, André Ventura had no YouTube channel.} 5_{At the time of the data collection, Santiago Abascal had no YouTube channel.}

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Facebook was the privileged platform in the Portuguese case, and in the Spanish case, this was the only platform where the leader surpassed the party in regards to frequency. Conversely, CH posted more than Ventura, possibly taking into account the party’s somewhat more favourable ‘traction’, considering that its accounts were created earlier. Twitter was, by far, the most used platform by VOX and Abascal. In the case of VOX, it is necessary to clarify that the collected data corresponding to the pre-election period revealed a gap of sixteen days (the earliest post dates back to 26 October 2019, not to October 10th), suggesting a block (at the occasion of data collection, it was detected that VOX’s account had already been blocked by Twitter) and/or extraordinary circumstances limiting data capture.

Along these lines, and considering Ventura’s less prominent social media presence and CH’s low engagement with YouTube, the data anticipate a less consistent social media strategy than in the Spanish case.

Tables 4 and 5, below, provide more details in regards to the different periods. Overall, the data anticipate a prioritisation of the pre-election period, except for Ventura’s slightly higher posting activity in the post-election period, on par with CH’s activity on YouTube.

Table 4. Number of posts per actor and per platform, before and after the election | CH and André Ventura

Actors CH André Ventura CH André Ventura Period (dd/mm/yyyy) Pre-election: 06/09/2019 - 06/10/2019 Post-election: 07/10/2019 - 06/11/2019 Facebook Nr. of collected posts 155 51 51 74 Twitter 89 6 63 16 Instagram 112 --- 49 --- YouTube 1 --- 12 ---

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Table 5. Number of posts per actor and per platform, before and after the election | VOX and Santiago Abascal

Actors VOX Santiago Abascal VOX Santiago Abascal Period (dd/mm/yyyy) Pre-election: 10/10/2019 - 10/11/2019 Post-election: 11/11/2019 - 10/12/2019 Facebook Nr. of collected posts 67 159 51 44 Twitter 931 619 849 232 Instagram 103 105 38 28 YouTube 85 --- 19 ---

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3. Findings

This chapter is organized in four sections addressing each platform, with subsections corresponding to each actor, in the pre- and post-election period.

3.1 Facebook

3.1.1 CH and André Ventura

3.1.1.1 CH – Pre-election

According to Facebook’s page transparency feature (as of 27 February 2020), CH created its Facebook page in October 2018, thus before it was officially established (April 2019), which suggests an effort in initiating early mobilisation of support via Facebook. Moreover, according to the information provided, this page had not run ads.

In the pre-election period, CH issued five posts per day, on average. From the total 155 posts, 27 were selected, which fulfilled at least one of the following conditions (minimum): 100 comments, 150 shares, or 500 reactions. Table 6 shows that the party privileged photo-type posts in the pre-election period, and that the majority of the most engaged-with posts included videos.

Table 6. Collected posts and respective selection per type

Type Count for

the whole data set Count for the selected posts Link 22 5 Photo 100 9 Status 2 1 Video 31 12 Grand Total 155 27

Some of the selected posts included hashtags, although these were not abundant. The hashtags referred mainly to the party’s motto/name (#CHEGA, i.e. ENOUGH; #PartidoCHEGA), although a hashtag praising Ventura was also found (#VenturaBEM),

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connected to Ventura’s participation in a televised debate. Another hashtag was used to antagonise the left and their ‘gender ideology’ (#deixemascriançasempaz, i.e., leave the kids alone), accompanying a video in which a writer and grandmother endorses CH for standing against such ideology. This finding echoes Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro’s populist attacks to the left with his commitment to “combat gender ideology” (Phillips).

Other attacks within the populist ‘us versus them’ performance were found, in posts targeting left-wing parties with parliamentary seat, namely PAN – People, Animals and Nature, and the Left Block. CH made use of proverbial, and emphasised their incompetence, and their ‘cuteness’ disguising ‘dangerous’ proposals favouring the criminals. One of the posts included a shared article from a partisan news website for a reputational attack, echoing the ‘network propaganda’ during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign (Benkler et al.). A further example of hybridity is shown in figure 3, with CH sharing a piece of news to attack the leftist candidate Joacine (party Livre), reacting to her comparison between Ventura and Bolsonaro, as published in a radio news station’s website two days before the election.

Figure 3. ‘Us versus them’

Source: https://www.facebook.com/1989920374407828/posts/2564665396933320/; October 4, 2019

Caption: ‘You can yell and say what you want in these last hours of campaigning. The Portuguese people woke up and already decided to give CHEGA the strength it needs to the and the [sic] the new voice of change in the Parliament.’ / Headline: ‘Joacine Katar Moreira

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The other posts with links also related to news, serving the performance of crisis; and victory construction through polls, with CH praising the expected election of Ventura, again appealing to ‘change’, a post also found among CH’s most engaged-with Instagram posts.

One of the photo-type posts (figure 4) included images related to the party’s electoral programme, each image depicting the leader and encapsulating one proposal, within a ‘proposal-in-image’ technique, inserted in an album comprising 50 of CH’s ‘70 measures to reinvigorate Portugal’. In this post’s caption there was also a link to the third-party service Linktree6

, a launchpad to external online content, through which the user could get redirected to CH’s website, to a Google form as a sign-up to join the party, or to CH’s YouTube channel. This finding is suggestive of platformisation tendencies, on the one hand, for the proposal-in-image technique and its potential for dissemination, within an attempted simplification of the content of the proposals; on the other hand, in terms of cross-fertilisation, considering a possible intention in leveraging views and subscriptions on YouTube, and in prompting mobilisation. The use of Linktree was observed in a second post (figure 5), as well as among CH’s most engaged-with Instagram posts.

Figure 4. Electoral programme

Source: https://www.facebook.com/1989920374407828/posts/2552063354860191/; September 28, 2019

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Another finding denoting platformisation tendencies is the adoption of livestreaming. Indeed, five of the videos in this selection related to this practice. Four were amateurish mobile-broadcast livestreams: two as commemoration of the election results; and two with Ventura talking to the press whilst campaigning on the streets of downtown Lisbon. In the latter case, Ventura addressed issues of political corruption, and the insecurity of ‘the people’ due to criminality (drug- and rape-related), evoking statistical data about the Romani in jail, whilst also criticising ‘political correctness’, himself adopting an ‘unfiltered’ style and an anti-system position. This populist performance of crisis is much in line with Trump’s style, taking the example of Trump framing Obama and Clinton’s political correctness as dangerous to the safety of the ordinary Americans (Weigel).

The livestreaming affordance, rolled out early in 2016, allows users to engage live with the event, reacting (e.g., clicking ‘like’, ‘love’, ‘angry’) and commenting. Cervi has studied this genre through its use by the Italian far-right politician Salvini, highlighting the importance of real-time connections for both the creators and the audience (Cervi 101). Larsson has also found this practice in his study of Swedish parties’ Facebook viral posts during elections, with parties often encouraging followers to engage (Larsson). CH did not appeal to participation in these four posts, nevertheless this finding is indicative of the synergy between the populist style and the platform’s vernaculars as the party was able to establish a direct and ‘authentic’ relationship with the followers, paramount for the populist performance.

The fifth Facebook live referred to the livestream of a major televised electoral debate broadcast by the Portuguese public service RTP, including most of the 21 candidates to the general election, and in which Ventura took part. CH edited the Facebook live adding its branding and hashtags, and, in this case, did appeal to platform-based participation asking followers to share with their friends, thereby both giving a sense of proximity and attempting at driving engagement with the debate, an influential moment for voting decisions.

Other calls to action were observed in this selection within different approaches. The following example reveals a different tone and format to motivate engagement: CH asked for the diffusion of the ‘truth’ about the party and Ventura in a post including an amateur video in which Ventura appeared talking in an informal setting, in the occasion of an electoral campaign activity, himself adopting a ‘mundane’ posture. In this ‘lengthy’ video (18’31’’), Ventura emphasised stigmatisation of CH; and also the failure of the system based on ‘scandalous’ taxation without return, the (moral) corruption of the political elites across the political spectrum, and crime, instilling fear, also by ostracising the Romani. The ostracism of others aligns with previous research for right-wing populists (Engesser, Ernst, et al. 1122).

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Another call to action was posted on the last day of electoral campaigning, a long statement in which the party encouraged supporters to cast their ballot, and to take their family and friends, denoting populist tendencies within the division ‘us versus them’, inciting resentment focusing on the system’s support of ‘miscreants’, promotion of ‘cultural invasion’ and privilege of politicians and their families and friends, instead of ‘our own who have nothing after decades of hard work’. Moreover, the post also included an emotional appeal to ‘the people’–‘Don’t forget that we are a FAMILY!’. The appeal to the people was further observed in a different format: in a post containing a ‘Vox pop’ video with a message from an elder citizen showing support for CH.

CH’s performance of crisis is well illustrated in a ‘status update’ in which the party instrumentalised an aggression to a police officer that had happened the day before, announcing the suspension of its electoral campaigning activity for that day to ‘draw attention to the escalating problem’, and the ‘shameful’ conduct of ‘the government and other political forces’, a post that was also found among CH’s most engaged-with Instagram posts. Figure 5 also illustrates the performance of crisis accompanied by a memetic image, with the party conveying a sense of material threat, framing past and present socialist leadership as responsible for economic downfall, a finding that is in line with Trump’s populist rhetoric based on emphasising grievances and on giving a prospect of future defeat (Homolar and Scholz). This post was also found among CH’s most engaged-with Instagram posts. The ballot card frame is part of the party’s style, having been found in other platforms as well. Figure 6 shows a variation of the ballot card frame, in this case referencing CH’s social media and messaging channels, in a post focusing on media censorship and media manipulation (television) by the ‘SOCIALIST STATE’, highlighting an active role of the government in exerting censorship and control via nepotism and cronyism.

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Figure 5. Performance of crisis

Caption: ‘Knowing about the past is a way for us to understand the present and to prepare ourselves for the future, we don’t forget! ENOUGH! [hashtag] Check the full programme at [linktree; hashtag]’. Text in image: ‘We all know how this journey is going to end. On the 6th

don’t forget about this. Vote CHEGA!’ / Mileposts: bankruptcy, recession, ‘do you understand how this is going to end?’)

Figure 6. Ballot card frame

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Whereas the most reacted-to post included a picture of Ventura and the team during the celebration of the election results (3,104 reactions, mainly like and love), the post that peaked in terms of comments (1,271) and shares (7,603) included a 18-second video which was an excerpt of a news piece. This video showed the Prime Minister António Costa engaging in verbal confrontation with a citizen, a situation that CH exacerbates in the post, equating the Prime Minister to ‘SOCIALIST DICTATORS’. According to a report on online disinformation by MediaLab ISCTE-IUL and Democracy Reporting International (Cardoso et al.), the false story to which this post relates first appeared in a Facebook post in October 2017, a few months after its appearance on traditional and digital news outlets. Nevertheless, the false story only became viral on Facebook in the summer of 2019, further spreading to Twitter. When in October 2019, during electoral campaigning, a citizen approached the Prime Minister making a claim based on the false story, to which the Prime Minister reacted abruptly, it made headlines, being further (re)circulated on social media. This finding thus denotes the entanglement between different forces within the hybrid media system and party propaganda, in which social media affordances play an important role.

Lastly, only two posts featured other CH members, with posts focusing on Ventura being frequent. The post in figure 7, related to Ventura’s participation in a fact-checking programme on television, shows a different presentation of the leader compared to his image on the proposal-in-image material.

Figure 7. Praising the leader

Caption: ‘Today it became clear that André Ventura is more than able to fill the position he proposes. / I VOTE CHEGA!’

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3.1.1.2 CH – Post-election

In the post-election period, the party decreased its posting activity by circa two thirds, posting less than two posts per day, on average, which suggests that the party privileged Facebook as an arena for electoral campaigning. For the analysis of the post-election period, 16 posts were selected out of the total 51. These fulfilled at least one of the following conditions (minimum): 200 comments, 500 shares, or 2,000 reactions. Table 7 shows that, in the post-election period, the party posted more link-type posts rather than photo-type posts. In the post-election period, hashtags were also utilised by CH, although not abundantly, all corresponding to the party’s motto/name.

Table 7. Collected post-election posts and respective selection per type

the whole data set Count for selected posts Link 23 7 Photo 14 2 Status 1 0 Video 13 7 Grand Total 51 16

Posts about the beginning of functions were found in this selection, for example with CH embedding a video edited from a piece from a news and opinion magazine about Ventura and his team’s first day, highlighting the support received from the Portuguese and Ventura’s commitment in ‘bringing hope and change’, but also with Ventura mentioning an ‘aura of hostility’, a post that was also found among CH’s most engaged-with Instagram posts.

Indeed, posts addressing stigma and controversy emerged. CH shared a piece from an online-born news outlet reporting on a Facebook post by Ventura in which CH’s leader ‘exposed’ the newly-elected MP Joacine (Livre) for not greeting him after being together at a televised debate in the aftermath of the election. Two other posts included attacks to MP Joacine: CH shared pieces from newspapers’ websites covering a march against racism and in support of MP Joacine, which CH labelled as ‘THE MARCH OF HATE!’, ridiculing it and considering it an insult to ‘the Portuguese’, within a performance of ‘us versus them’, othering MP Joacine and her supporters, and further minorities ‘that do not abide by the Portuguese culture’, and illegal immigrants ‘financed by the Portuguese’s taxes’.

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The polarising populist performance was further observed with the appeal ‘the Portuguese have already realised who is on their side’, based on stigmatisation against Ventura and the party, in this case from the right-wing People’s Party (CDS-PP) regarding the controversial attribution of a seat to Ventura at the parliament. In this post the party shared a video in which a commentator addressed the controversy during a newscast, highlighting the absence of ‘hysteria’ with the communists and neo-communists in the parliament.

In this selection, shared articles from CH’s website and a video from its YouTube channel were found, revealing cross-posting activity and populist tendencies. The articles/posts related to an attack to the newly-formed government and its ‘shameful’ programme, with a chauvinist accusation to the left for wanting to ‘transform Portugal into a kind of Venezuela’; and to a policy proposal presented to the parliament to reduce the number of MPs, a central topic in more posts, one of them including a news piece covering the presentation of the proposal, to show the ‘fulfilment’ of the electoral programme. The YouTube video was related to Ventura’s parliamentary activity regarding the government’s programme, in this case ‘exposing’ the government’s hidden plans to raise taxes to sustain ‘the largest cabinet ever’, and to legalise euthanasia.

One of the video-type posts reveals the adoption of a new genre applied to a pre-election issue: a montage including scenes of violence towards police officers, seemingly captured via mobile phone, suggestive of participatory/user-generated content (Baldwin-Philippi, ‘The Technological Performance of Populism’). The post, ‘signed’ by Ventura, addressed yet another aggression to a police officer, with Ventura announcing the presentation of a new proposal to the parliament to protect the ‘disenfranchised’ police force. Populist tendencies are revealed through the performance of crisis supported by audio-visual ‘flagrant proof’ with the leader ‘directly’ addressing ‘the people’, presented as ‘the one’ taking action to protect the police that ‘defend us’. Along these lines, this finding is illustrative of the constitutive role of the platform vernaculars to the populist performance.

Moreover, a new practice was identified, suggestive of platformisation tendencies: sharing other users’ Facebook posts. In one case, from Ventura, with mobile phone-captured footage denouncing ‘outrageous’ offenses to the Portuguese flag alluding to a protest by Livre supporters, with Ventura assuming a posture of ‘shield’ against the ‘immoral monsters’, thereby also denoting populist tendencies. In the second case, the party shared a Facebook post by a local fire squad unit reporting on an assault allegedly perpetrated by Romani, which served the polarising performance of crisis, highlighting the state’s protection of ‘miscreants’. Posts

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pivoting on both events were circulated on other platforms, including by Ventura, thus showing a concerted effort between party and leader.

The post that excelled in all engagement measures relates to the assault to the fire squad unit, and is suggestive of platformisation tendencies as it includes a memetic image (figure 8), reminiscent of the tabloid genre, which is often associated with populism. CH attacks the Minister of Internal Administration, framing the minister as being involved in corruption cases, and as siding with the criminals, thereby revealing populist tendencies for the polarising performance of crisis. CH circulated this post on Twitter and Instagram, where it also emerged among the most engaged-with posts.

Figure 8. Most engaged-with post

Source: https://www.facebook.com/1989920374407828/posts/2631545923578600/; November 3, 2019

In blue and white, above: ‘Firefighters assaulted in Borba. The Minister of Internal Administration downplays the incident and assures that Portugal is a reference in security.’

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3.1.1.3 André Ventura – Pre-election

Through Facebook’s page transparency affordance (as of 27 February 2020), it was possible to realise that Ventura’s page had been created roughly one month before the short campaigning period, contrary to CH’s page which was created approximately one year before the general election. There were no data about ads having been run during the timeframe analysed in this study. However, it is relevant to note that, contrary to CH, Ventura’s page was running ads in February 2020, several months after the general election, suggesting an increased engagement with the platform’s affordances, and a strategy focused on the leader.

In the pre-election period, Ventura issued 51 posts. For the selection of the most engaged-with posts the following criteria were considered (minimum): 50 comments, 50 shares, or 400 reactions. Posts matching at least one of the criteria were selected, which resulted in a total of 11 posts. In the pre-election period, Ventura’s posting activity was not very intensive: less than two post per day, on average, versus CH’s average of five daily posts in the same period. Like CH, Ventura also posted more photos in this period (table).

Table 8. Collected pre-election posts and respective selection per type

the whole data set Count for selected posts Link 10 2 Photo 34 7 Status 1 0 Video 6 2 Grand Total 51 11

In the pre-election period, the links in the most engaged-with posts were related to news. One of the posts, dating from the day of the election, included a piece shared from a television broadcaster’s news website covering Ventura’s presence at the ballot box, and issuing a patriotic appeal to voting.

The second link-type post included a shared news piece from a digital news media outlet, and covered Ventura’s ‘fearless’ challenge to the ‘establishment’ regarding CH’s electoral proposal to fine MPs for skipping parliamentary sessions, a way to ‘moralise the shameful political system’. This finding denotes populist tendencies for the emphasis on a moralistic polarising performance of crisis, which focuses on the ‘backstage’ of politics. The

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moralistic tone reflects Wiles’ assertion of populism as moralistic, valuing ‘correct attitude and spiritual make-up’ (Wiles 167). This moralising attitude was also observed among CH’s pre-election Facebook posts, and figure 9 shows a different approach, with Ventura outside a catholic church, in this case invoking the extraordinariness of the leader, and further echoing Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential campaign, in which religion played a major role (Londoño and Darlington).

Figure 9. Emotional outburst

Caption: ‘In order for evil to triumph, it only takes people of good to do nothing. May God always give me the strength and courage to keep fighting.’

Among Ventura’s pre-election most engaged-with posts was also a short video addressing the then salient wildfires issue, with mobile-captured footage of Ventura on the spot, aligned with a populist performance of crisis connecting the issue to terrorism. The instrumentalization of ongoing events was further observed related to the suppression of bank passbooks, with Ventura presenting CH as ‘the only voice of the people’. Furthermore, the

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suspension of campaigning activity following the aggression to a police officer was also found within this selection, demonstrating the concerted effort between party and leader. However, whereas CH posted a text-based ‘official’ announcement, Ventura addressed the issue in a post with a screenshot of a news piece from a digital outlet covering this suspension, thereby denoting the varied repertoire between party and leader in exacerbating the same issue.

An issue surfacing within this selection was the termination of lifetime subventions granted to politicians, also found among CH’s most engaged-with Facebook posts, thereby also showing a party-leader concerted effort in advancing an agenda. One of the posts was the most engaged-with in all three categories (102 comments, 3,730 shares, and 1,141 reactions), and included a video edited from a news broadcast, in which the ballot-card frame with CH’s social media channels was inserted. In this short video, Ventura evoked the corrupt system favouring the political elites to the detriment of ‘the ones most in need’, reporting on his immediate actions, thereby denoting populist tendencies. Figure 10 shows a photo-type post addressing this issue.

Lastly, a more positive tone regarding electoral campaigning was observed in a post including a selfie ‘on the road’, in this case tapping on platform genres.

Figure 10. Electoral campaigning activity

Caption: ‘At the door of Évora prison, demanding the corrupt to give back their lifetime subventions. And to renounce them! Be ashamed! ENOUGH’

Lived Populism: Mainstream Social Media and the Resurgence of the Far Right in Portugal and Spain

Universiteit van Amsterdam