The next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Alban Zeneli, whose focus is on the 2025 elections in Kosovo. Kosovo remains a region in transition, and political campaigning might unfold differently here; the focus of the present paper, then, is on how parties used Facebook and Instagram in their campaigning.
Kosovo’s political instability meant that it had two national elections in 2025, in February and December; populist politics (characterised by people-centrism, anti-elitism, and exclusionary tendencies towards minority others) played a significant role here, and were expressed also through visual communication.
The present project focusses on the December election, and collected the posts of parties and political leaders across the two platforms. It has already manually coded the 1,277 Facebook posts it gathered, focussing especially on images and the first minute of videos in these posts.
Vies and interactions were very unevenly distributed across these parties, and neither matched the number of posts made or the number of votes received by them. Likes on the posts of the major candidates for the Prime Ministership did align fairly well with the direct votes they received, however.
