The final speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Delia Balaban, who shifts our focus to Romania. Romania has had some electoral turmoil as its 2024 presidential elections had to be annulled and repeated following massive Russian influence operations; but this also affected the 2024 parliamentary elections, which themselves were affected by scandals over dubious campaign funding.
Those controversies centred on TikTok, but Delia’s focus here is, to begin with, on the 2024 European Parliament elections on Facebook, which remains a key platform for political information and overall news in Romania. This was a highly polarised election, with two mainstream parties forming a joint election list in order to combat the growing threat from far-right parties; in the subsequent national election those ‘sovereigntist’, populist, far-right parties won some 35% of the vote share.
Across these two elections, then, how did parties seek to mobilise their voters? In both, the call to vote dominated, at around one third of all posts; other mobilisation calls (to share and like posts, for instance) were marginal. This was also very unevenly distributed across the parties, though. Other topics included electoral procedures, and (in the national elections) agriculture, housing, and other key issues.
The populist parties as well as the major Hungarian-minority party in Romania were especially prominent in addressing their posts to ‘the people’, in order to mobilise their vote; such mobilisation is thus a significant but thin and potentially underutilised form of campaigning.
