Kings, jesters, or kingmakers? European populist parties as a microcosm for celebrity politics

Abstract

The article explores a key aspect in the development of contemporary European populist parties: the celebrity dynamics of their leadership. It presents a systematic comparison of leaders from the main populist parties, exploring the correlation between leadership visibility, fame, and the ideological and organisational characteristics of parties. Furthermore, it investigates the subset of leaders whose public notoriety predates their political involvement, with a view to establishing how they balance the demands of political responsibility and authenticity of character, both in terms of organisational control and communicative strategy. Analytically, the study helps illuminate the mechanisms through which populist parties adapt to participation in the political game while continuing to mark their ideological difference. Empirically, the findings highlight the uniqueness of an outlier case, Beppe Grillo’s leadership of Italy’s Five-Star Movement, in which celebrity is leveraged into a kingmaker role, while still retaining the public persona of an outside observer.

“Backstage moments during the campaign”: The interactive use of Instagram by Spanish political leaders

“…If we focus on SNS interactivity, in the case of Twitter—the SNS that has aroused the biggest scholarly interest (Filimonov et al, 2016)—accumulated knowledge indicates that politicians do not often put it to an interactive use (Golbeck et al, 2010; Graham et al, 2013; Grant et al, 2010; Larsson and Moe, 2011; Mirer and Bode, 2015; Vergeer, 2020). Some of the findings on interactive communication on Facebook are also ambivalent (Karl, 2017), and there is evidence that political web 2.0 sites, like blogs, can be used as broadcasting tools (Giglioli and Baldini, 2019). Thus, it could be said that “Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are mainly used for one-way persuasive communication, from the campaign outwards” (Lilleker, 2016: 236).…”

Populist everyday politics in the (mediatized) age of social media: The case of Instagram celebrity advocacy

“…In this article, I enquire into the communicative-performative conditions, emotional and moral, under which social networking platforms become hubs of populist everyday politics and the implications this raises for liberal democracy. Both everyday politics and populism are found to have an “elective affinity” (Gerbaudo, 2018) with social media, often for the very same reasons: social media have accentuated the decoupling of political representation from the formal-institutional and technocratic management of citizens’ official interests by mainstream policymakers, valorizing, even more, the informal/extra-institutional and communicative articulation of people’s everyday concerns and demands by “charismatic leaders,” “celebrity politicians,” and “celebrity political advocates” (see also Giglioli and Baldini, 2019; Kissas, 2020; Mazzoleni and Bracciale, 2018; Zeglen and Ewen, 2020). My focus here shall be on non-politician celebrities as “unelected persons [who] may legitimately represent politically the views and values of others” (Street, 2004: 447), since their role in populist everyday politics is rather under-researched.…”