We’re into the final panel at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno, and I’ll be the final presenter (with slides coming soon). We start, though, with Jan Křovák, whose focus is on populism in the 2025 German and Czech elections.
He begins by describing populism as a communication strategy which is anti-elite and against out-groups, and which has become more mainstream in recent years – mainstream parties confronted by populist challengers have increasingly adopted populist rhetoric, while populist parties themselves have also become more mainstream in their electoral appeal.
This has played out very differently in Germany and the Czech Republic so far; in Germany, the AfD has been very successful but firewalled from coalitions with other parties; in Czechia, the current government is a coalition of three populist parties.
This analysis examines posts from Facebook, Instagram, and X across the last two weeks of each election campaign; it manually codes for the presence of populist actors, topics, and strategies in these social media posts by the leading candidates. Ultimately, this codes posts across a scale from no or latent populist communication to soft or hard populism.
This classification takes two routes: 16 thematic categories are classified as soft or hard populism, and their presence per post is aggregated; but explicit othering and dehumanising of out-groups is an instant trigger for a hard populism categorisation.
Some populist communication is present across all candidate accounts, but its extent differs widely. The Czech mainstream actors, facing imminent defeat, included considerable levels of manifest populism; German mainstream actors, still slated to form government, showed far less manifest populism, and no hard populism at all. Shared across mainstream and populist parties were people-centrism, emotionalisation, informality, and visual people-centrism; unique to populists were divides between the people and the elite, out-group othering, and other strategies.
Some populist actors were very consistent in their hard populism, while others mixed highly populist and more mainstream posting styles. Some populist actors in the Czech Republic who were likely to win the election also toned down their communication style, presumably in order to attract a larger share of the vote.
