Populist Contagion: how Covid-19 led European leaders to use populist rhetoric on social media

The Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting socio-economic crisis forced contemporary society to face its structural problems. As crises shed light on the solidity of the political and economic system, it is therefore certainly no coincidence that the greatest historical revolutions - for better or for worse - occurred precisely in conjunction with them. The Covid-19 emergency forced us to move most of our activities online. This change also affected the political sphere, forcing leaders to rely more and more on social media platforms. In many democracies, this transition went hand in hand with the pre-existing populist wave, which already resorted to social media as its main communication tool. The paper will analyze how Covid-19 has affected the way party leaders in Western Europe communicate with their voters (or may we say “followers”?) on social media, comparing posts of both populist and mainstream party leaders in Italy, UK and Spain. In order to do so, we use what we define “four essential characteristics of Populism” (Chameleonic Nature; Manichean Dialectics, Anti-Elitism and Charismatic Leadership) as analytic categories to identify populist attitudes within the text, not only when it comes to rhetoric but also to studying the way certain political issues are discussed by political leaders and their parties. The research is led through content analysis with the support of CrowdTangle. The program allows us to extract posts produced by the different leaders on their Facebook and Instagram profiles without time limitations. We analyze leaders’ posts published in contemporary to important political decisions at both national and European level, from 2018 onwards. The aim is to detect the shifting towards populist rhetoric after the beginning of Covid-19 pandemic in Europe in March of 2020. The paper highlights how the pandemic pushed party leaders toward populist behaviors, even when they were not originally heads of populist parties. This can be traced to the intrinsic characteristics of social media, which only allow for a certain number of characters to be written and rely more on pictures than words. Because of this, leaders have to rely on more direct and impactful rhetoric to deliver their message to their followers. However, the “populist contagion” runs deeper than the mere use of communication techniques, and it could affect the way leaders (and, therefore, parties) deal with certain political and policy issues.