The Divergent Populist Styles of Italian Politicians

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Giovanni Daniele Starita, whose focus is on the endemic populist nature of political discourse, especially in digital spheres, in Italy. Not all Italian politicans are populist, but they all seem to ‘do’ populism – well beyond typical actors such as Berlusconi, Grillo, and Salvini.

The focus here is on Italy’s new Prime Minister Georgia Meloni and former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, exploring their uses of backstage, frontstage, and mid-region behaviours in their social media activities. This also draws on understandings of populism as a political style, and of celebrity politics – both focus on visual self-representation, but either as a person of the people or as an exceptionally capable politician. These two styles should be inherently contradictory; performing ordinaryness requires a focus on backstage behaviour, while performing celebrity status privileges frontstage depictions.

The project explored this with a focus on Meloni’s and Renzi’s Instagram accounts, analysing their for their visual styles and representations. Meloni mainly showed off the job contexts (49%); Renzi showed mainly on-stage (32%) representations. This points to distinctly different styles: celebrity politics for Renzi, off-the-job personal activities for Meloni. Beyond this, both politicians used plenty of middle-region imagery: with celebrities, colleagues, and the people, and in everyday professional situations. Such imagery mixes backstage and frontstage elements. Meloni’s approach is similar to that of a professional influence from; Renzi’s more as a professional politician.

Circumstances of location and accompaniment are thus very important to both of them, but employed very differently. The resolve the tension between personal and professional self-presentation in divergent ways, possibly because of their different positioning on the political spectrum.