Communication and Politics: Giorgia Meloni, a Prime Minister between Pop Propaganda and Nationalism ()
1. Introduction
The following research aims to investigate the development and the communicative approach of Giorgia Meloni within the Fratelli d’Italia party from the year 2020, when, as a consequence of the significant consensus decline experienced by one of the Italian mainstream parties, the Partito Democratico, the Italian electorate’s endorsement and appreciation towards Fratelli d’Italia underwent an exponential increase, leading Giorgia Meloni to reach an overwhelming majority on 25 September 2022, when the Italian citizens have voted for the renewal of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic, political elections that gave as a result the victory of the centre-right coalition declaring the leader as Italy’s Prime Minister.
Several factors determined Giorgia Meloni’s popularity among the electorate, such as the citizens’ distrust of traditional parties. However, an extremely important element has been the shift occurred in the Prime Minister’s communication strategy: if previously Giorgia Meloni used to communicate and interface with her electorate through a meagre, informal and polemical style, during the COVID-19 pandemic she overturned the standards characterising such communication. By triggering a more intimate, private, and close way of conveying information to the voters, she showed a more human and less institutional dimension, which realized a doubling of followers on the most used social platforms in Italy, namely Instagram and Facebook1.
Accordingly, the contribution aims to analyse the pop propaganda and the intimate politics fielded by Giorgia Meloni, firstly by providing a theoretical background that outlines the origin, significance and application of the concepts discussed; secondly, by sampling from the Fratelli d’Italia leader’s Facebook page posts dating between 2020 and 2022, in order to enable a comparison of different communication styles over time to explore to which extent there may be a correlation between political communication and Giorgia Meloni’s rise to government as Italy’s first woman Prime Minister.
Furthermore, the research’s main objective resides in verifying and examining through the support of literature on nationalist ideology any eventual associations between Giorgia Meloni’s communication strategy and nationalism.
Therefore, the paper is structured in four different paragraphs.
The first section provides an overview of the main theories regarding political communication which represents the essential theoretical background to unravel concepts such as pop propaganda and intimate politics.
The second paragraph illustrates the methodology employed during the exploratory study, justifying the choices made during the research process and the possible implications arising from the same under both structural and analytical perspectives. The third paragraph describes the core of the research through the presentation of the selected posts and their discussion built according to the theoretical elements proposed within the first paragraph. Furthermore, the relationship existing between the pop contents published by Giorgia Meloni and the nationalist ideology veiled within them is pointed out through the use of supporting academic literature on the subject.
The fourth paragraph summarises the evidence emerged from the research and discusses the potential consequences, reflecting on the possible risks of the investigation and the conceivable applications of the methodology employed in possible new case studies.
2. Theoretical Background: Political Communication, Pop Propaganda and Intimate Politics
In order to analyse the main characteristics of Giorgia Meloni’s communication strategy and its evolution over the years it is necessary to contextualise and highlight the main theoretical interpretations of the concepts of political communication, pop propaganda and intimate politics.
The concept of political communication commonly refers to an exchange of knowledge and contents within a precise communicative environment and process, which, given its relationship-based character, shares the same characteristics and assumptions as communication in its broadest sense. The action of communicating, although it may seem to be a trivial datum characterizing the social life of every human being, can be articulated in multiple aspects. It is possible to define communication depending on the system chosen, for instance referring to advertising communication, political communication, and even scientific communication (Mazzoleni, 2012) .
Therefore, it is understandable how the system to which reference is made turns the social action of communicating unique and different from others, reason why elements can be pointed out to distinguish different kinds of communication approaches and experiences. Political communication constitutes a complex system due to the heterogeneous coexistence of thematic areas, such as psychology, rhetoric, eloquence, factors, and variables that impact the way political actors communicate and consequently differentiate by making one communication strategy extremely highly subjective compared to another.
Mazzoleni, one of the leading experts on the communication phenomenon, argues that political communication represents “the exchange as well as the discussion of political public interest contents produced by the political system itself, by the mass-media and by citizens, not only in their capacity as voters”, a definition that implies the presence of other actors within the communicative action, which thus develops in a sending-receiving relation respectively embodied by the politician and the voter (Mazzoleni & Bracciale, 2019) .
To be more precise, it is necessary to highlight how the message, the content of the exchange is itself an essential element of communication.
In particular what cooperates in making the distribution and the reception effective is the way the content is conveyed, especially if it is through different sources. Indeed, the type of channel adopted directly affects the management of the information and the attitude of those who spread it, indirectly typifying both the sender and the receiver of the message.
The main actors in political communication are thus represented by the target political system which refers to the political institutions as a whole, in detail the parties and their respective leaders; the media system, which can be synthetically described as “the set of media institutions that carry out knowledge production and distribution activities” (McQuail, 2001) ; and the citizen-voter, who can either represent the citizen as an individual or public opinion, understood as demos, such as when the object of analysis is the audience (Ceccarini, 2015) .
As argued by Giampiero Mazzoleni, political communication represents the synthesis between two worlds, that of information and that of institutions, made of political parties and leaders (Mazzoleni, 2012) . These include the public space and the public sphere (Habermas, 1962) , elements that are distinctive of political communication in a democratic context in which the citizen, or more commonly the individual, can form and inform himself by virtue of the plurality of sources to which he has access, generally reflected in the political programmes and political parties embedded in the political system (Habermas, 1962) .
Since the 1990s the channels through which political communication has been offered have undergone remarkable transformations, moving from a public space and sphere to a mediatised public space. Following the advent of the World Wide Web, the rhythms of political communication have also changed, thus reflecting precise logics and algorithms dictated by the main social platforms, revealing how players on the virtual stage of the public sphere can be classified in terms of the power or the capital they have at their disposal.
The stratification of opportunities to transform power into public influence through the channels of mediated communication thereby reveals a power structure (Habermas, 2006) .
Political communication is then a synonym of power (Habermas, 2006) , which in order to be applied requires consensus and thus propaganda, which, again, determines the raising of “the level of skills needed to manage and assess the quality of contents and the effectiveness of actions” (Vaccari, 2012) in the digital world. And it is precisely in relation to the kind of content to be published that political communication has developed a pop tendency, an epithet that clarifies how politics has abandoned its original function as an expression of power to take on the typical connotations of entertainment (Mazzoleni & Bracciale, 2019) , drawing inspiration from pop culture understood in the artistic sense, which, according to Horkheimer, “has the power to penetrate our way of thinking, through the constant reproduction of standardised stereotypes” (McKernan, 2011) .
The stereotypes that characterise the pop propaganda include all possible representations of events of a private and personal nature, capable of universalising a message and appealing to the emotions and conceptions of the electorate addressed through the celebrityisation of the political actor (McKernan, 2011) , a communicative strategy that is concretised in intimate politics. Political communication that focuses on telling personal stories by turning them into persuasive tools represents intimate politics, i.e., triggering emotions in the electorate addressed by the political actor, thus involving them in the political actor’s personal storytelling (Cacciotto, 2019) .
Through the analyses carried out by Mazzoleni and Bracciale, it is possible to observe that pop communication “means that facts and characters, stories and words, which belong to the realm of politics, traditionally synonymous of complexity and self-referentiality, a world distant from people’s daily lives, become, through the media and especially television, familiar situations, subjects of curiosity and interest, topics of discussion, even entertainment sources, on a par with other narratives and characters that belong to the world of entertainment” (Mazzoleni & Bracciale, 2019) .
The communicative strategy and the linguistic style employed by Giorgia Meloni represent a clear example of pop propaganda and intimate politics, where elements such as epithets, pop quotations, informal slang and dialect as well as micronarratives incessantly recur, all components aimed at acting on the emotions and states of mind of potential voters rather than informing the electorate on the political agenda and institutional programmes, concretising an adaptation and approximation of the political actor to the everyday life of his audience (Moroni, 2019) .
3. Methodology and Research Design
The research is developed through the use of two methodological approaches: firstly, the qualitative approach which enables to collect data and information required to raise “questions and to provide new explanations of a given reality from a new perspective” (Reiter, 2017) . The qualitative approach allows the analysis on Giorgia Meloni’s pop propaganda by examining the posts randomly selected considering their contents such as text and images in order to outline and assess the presence of nationalist and sovereigntist ideologies between the lines.
Secondly, in order to unravel the contents of the selection made as smoothly as possible the research implies the Critical Discourse Analysis approach which is configured as a method capable of “exposing strategies that appear normal or neutral on the surface, but which may in fact be ideological and seek to shape the representation of events and persons for particular ends” (Machin & Mayr, 2012) . Considering how “ideology is frequently produced and reproduced through discourse” (Sengul, 2019) , the Critical Discourse Analysis represents a valid methodological approach to decipher the nationalist ideology embedded in Giorgia Meloni’s Facebook posts and masked in her communication strategy through the shape of pop micronarrative.
The selection of posts has been made randomly through the use of the Facebook platform. Through the advanced searching function, and by electing which year to focus on, it has been possible to visualise all the posts published by Giorgia Meloni based on keywords such as “nation”, “religion” and “migrants”, which were then selected and captured by the screenshot technique and subsequently proposed in the research text as images. With regard to the selection of the Facebook posts is necessary to clarify some aspects: although sampling may by its nature exclude relevant analytical elements, it is meaningful in terms of detecting particular dynamics highlighted through a broader survey and not restricted to narrowly tailored questions. Furthermore, on the basis of theories concerning political communication, the research attempts to readapt scientific formulations in a dynamic approach through “the process of ‘making sense’ of a phenomenon [which] is a gradual process that can be compared to a learning process. Exploratory research is characterised by a process of reformulating and adapting explanations, theories, and initial hypotheses inductively” (Reiter, 2017) , making sociological and linguistic hypotheses suitable for potential new case studies.
Regarding the selection of the case study, the choice to analyse Giorgia Meloni’s profile and not the official page of the Fratelli d’Italia party lies firstly in the significantly larger number of followers, amounting to 2.7 million2 in the first profile, and 510,0003 in the second one.
Secondly, it refers to the main research question, i.e., analysing the pop communication of the current Italian Prime Minister which is why converging on the personal profile has been an imperative for the accomplishment of the research itself.
Similarly, the platform choice is dictated by the greater number of followers on her Facebook profile, compared to Giorgia Meloni’s Instagram profile with 1.5 million followers4. Furthermore, according to a survey conducted in 2020 in Italy, Facebook is the most used platform among Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with 80.4% of users5.
4. The Giorgia Meloni’s Political Communication Strategy: The Facebook Posts
Giorgia Meloni, the current Italian Prime Minister and the leader of the Fratelli d’Italia party, has been involved in right-wing youth movements such as Fronte della Gioventù and Alleanza Nazionale since her youth, memberships that were later challenged due to various controversies based on statements and opinions held by the Prime Minister that could be attributed to the fascist doctrine.
Over time, she demonstrated excellent party organisation and political leadership skills, and, through her undisputed communication abilities, she gained experience and popularity within the Italian political scene, becoming first a deputy in 2006 with Alleanza Nazionale and then Minister for Youth in 2008 with the Berlusconi IV government with the party Il Popolo della Libertà. However, after a structural and ideological cleavage within the Popolo della Libertà in 2012, she joined Guido Crosetto and Ignazio La Russa, both from the same party, in establishing Fratelli di Italia.
Although in the first five years the party experienced a slow and modest evolution in terms of consensus, starting from 2018 the polls showed a strong growth which in 2020, right at the height of the pandemic crisis, marked an historic percentage of appreciation amounting to over 20%, bringing Fratelli d’Italia to be the leading party of the centre-right and the only party capable to compete with the mainstream party, Partito Democratico.
Her experience of militancy at an early age represented a period of intense training to the extent that Giorgia Meloni exploited the social networks within the local realities to boost her electorate, pushing in particular on the primacy of direct contact with and between the electorate, thus turning her communication accessible and user-friendly to all. In addition, she frequently participates in entertainment programmes, debates and interviews on television, a strategy that brings her closer to her supporters, and even subscribes to the main social platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook (to which Tik Tok will add in 2022) and creates personal profiles.
By conducting a close opposition to the ruling parties during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among the Mario Draghi government, both inside the institutional chambers and on social channels, she achieved a substantial increment of supporters, rising from 8% in 2019 to 21% in 2021.
Giorgia Meloni through the posts published on her Facebook profile has crafted a propaganda of severe and contrite tones, in touch with the needs of citizens during the COVID-19 crisis period, dynamic that have played a key role in the consensus speed up. Moreover, the occasionally romantic but never excessively sensationalist narrative aimed at making Italian citizens to feel represented by Giorgia Meloni as a woman, as a worker, and as an Italian politician particularly contribute to her rising.
Various issues are proposed by Meloni on her Facebook page, but coherently with her political positions, she repeatedly emphasises concepts such as “people”, “nation” and “sovereignty”, terms that describe distinctive elements of a populist narrative and nationalist ideology (Mudde, 2004) . The following selected posts represent an example. Specifically, Figure 1 displays a post by Giorgia Meloni published in October 2022 through which she declares her establishment within the Italian government and its commitment to draw up the ministerial list.
In Figure 2, which represents a post published in May 2022, the Premier asserts how the party she leads, Fratelli d’Italia, will pursue a patriotic path in order to restore the national pride by granting a future of greatness and glory to Italy.
In Figure 3, on the occasion of the national day of the Italian flag, Giorgia Meloni through the post published in January 2023, emphasises the attachment to the values of national identity and unity on which the country is rooted.
Figures 1-3, which refer to October and May of 2022 and January 2023, besides celebrating several occasions such as the national day of the Italian flag and
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Figure 1. The post refers to Giorgia Meloni’s establishment within the Italian government and the presentation of the Ministers’ draft list (October 2022).
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Figure 2. Giorgia Meloni claims that “the aim of Fratelli d’Italia is to restore the pride, the prestige and the authority that Italy deserves” (May 2022).
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Figure 3. Giorgia Meloni, in occasion of the celebration of the Italian flag, emphasises how the Tricolour symbolises national identity and unity, values on which the nation is grounded (January 2023).
the acceptance of the assignment of government building with Giorgia Meloni as a Prime Minister, repeat terms such as Patria, Nazione, Bandiera, Stato, Unità6, employed not casually but rather to reaffirm the sovereignty of citizenship and the importance of the concept of the nation-state. Conceptually, the terms Patria and Nazione embrace no substantial differences, apart from the typically figurative use through which Patria refers to the territorial boundaries in which citizens recognise their identity, while Nazione stands for the fundamental principles within a nation state through which the population acknowledges the state unity. Giorgia Meloni employs such terms in her social narrative evoking the nationalist ideology of the 20th century in which the term nation was frequently used to recognise a well-defined identity establishing the state’s authority.
Therefore, through the publication on her Facebook profile of the posts represented by Figures 1-3, Giorgia Meloni claims the monopoly of representation, stressing the divergences between those who support and safeguard the interests of the nation and those who do not. Such behaviour recalls the elite-class conflict that is typical of populist communication, attacking the elite is a key and distinctive element of populist propaganda, a feature made explicit by Laclau and his discursive style approach (Laclau, 2005) .
Moreover, the idea of the “sovereign people as an actor in an antagonistic relation with the established order” (Panizza & Miorelli, 2009) constitutes one of the main characteristics of populist parties, and more specifically nationalist and supremacist parties. Furthermore, supporting the assumption that Meloni’s political and communicative strategy draws inspiration from nationalist doctrine is the instrumental use of religion, where “it ends up becoming the justification of forms of political action” (Montanari, 2017) .
An example can be seen in the following posts. In particular, Figure 4 proposes a post published in June 2022 in which appears a photograph taken in Cremona during the Gay Pride event portraying a mannequin dressed as the Virgin Mary but bare-breasted and covered in make-up and lingerie that recalls the bondage scene, an image that Giorgia Meloni considered obscene and offensive to the Christian faith.
Similarly, Figure 5 proposes a post published in December 2021 in which the Premier states that the depiction of the Virgin Mary as a transgender represents a derision against religion and believers as well as a shaming provocation from the LGBTQIA+ community towards the Church.
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Figure 4. Giorgia Meloni condemns obscene acts and vandalism against the Christian religion occurred during the Pride parade in Cremona (June 2022).
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Figure 5. Giorgia Meloni speaks out against the depiction of the Virgin Mary as transgender, blaming the LGBTQIA+ community (December 2021).
Through the construction of a narrative based on faith and religion as main subjects, Giorgia Meloni frequently attacks minorities, such as the LGBTQIA+ community, arguing that attitudes and customs of a given community do not represent an inclusion hymn instead a mockery of Christian values and traditions. Therefore, the religion assumes a purely instrumental role, being indeed implied by the Premier in her pop propaganda as a vector through which to address a narrative close to the electorate, aimed to underline how the Christian origins of Italy depict a synonym of national identity. Moreover, it is possible to label the statements of Giorgia Meloni towards the LGBTQIA+ community as hatred epithets, commonly known as slurs, which according to Bianchi “communicate disdain, hatred and derision towards individuals and categories of individuals by virtue of belonging to a specific category, identified from time to time on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, and sexual orientation” (Bianchi, 2015) , figures of speech explicitly present in the contents displayed by Figure 4 and Figure 5.
Besides the use of the aforementioned terms and the instrumentalization of religion, the Giorgia Meloni’s communication strategy is also structured through the intimate politics approach given the personal and private dimension of the Prime Minister’s posts. If before 2019 there were few statements made by Giorgia Meloni about her private sphere, today countless are the Facebook posts that relate to her daily life, especially with regard to her couple’s life and her daughter Ginevra.
Specifically, Figure 6 displays a post published in December 2022 where Giorgia Meloni shows herself celebrating Christmas with her partner and their daughter, Ginevra. Both are often present in her Facebook and Instagram posts, thus providing a picture of the Prime Minister looking familiar, appealing to voters’ emotions through the transposition of her sentimental relationships. Similarly, Figure 7 shows a post published on the Premier Facebook profile in
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Figure 6. Giorgia Meloni, through a portrait that shows her with her daughter and her partner, wishes Merry Christmas to the Italian citizens (December 2022).
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Figure 7. Through a photo portraying her together with her mother and sister, she wishes happy birthday to her mother (August 2021).
August 2021 in which appears a picture portraying Giorgia Meloni with her
mother Anna and her sister Arianna. By the display of photographs captured during private occasions which depict the Prime Minister’s family ties is possible to identify the clear propaganda aim to set up a close connection with the audience and the electorate.
Similarly, Figure 8 represents a post published in August 2022 in which, through a photo portraying Giorgia Meloni, her mother Anna and her sister Arianna hugging each other, the Prime Minister argues about the difficulties and the risks related to obesity condition embraced by the mother, assessing how the need to raise awareness about issues such as eating disorders is something extremely relevant and socially indispensable.
Respectively, Figures 6-8, can be interpreted in the light of Hobsbawm’s analysis and studies on nationalism ideologies. As Eric Hobsbawm has argued, one of the most powerful evocations of nationalism is that of solidarity between
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Figure 8. Posting a photo with her mother Anna and sister Arianna, Giorgia Meloni addresses the eating disorder issue, sharing personal experiences as well as the obesity she suffered from in her youth (August 2022).
a group, a community, a society, entities that are, in turn, inevitably composed of a basic fundamental group, the family. The obsessive use of the concept as well as the image of the family represent the best known figurative invitation of modern nationalist movements and states (Dickie, 1991) . According to McClintock, “the family image was drawn on to figure hierarchy within unity as an organic element of historical progress, and thereby became indispensable for legitimizing exclusion and hierarchy within non-familial (affiliative) social formations such as nationalism, liberal individualism and imperialism” (McClintock, 1993) .
Moreover, McClintock suggests how the concept of family reflects the idea of historical change where “children naturally progress into adults, projecting the family image on to national and imperial progress” (McClintock, 1993) . The family is indeed built on blood and race bonds, items that inevitably evoke the nationalist doctrine; non-members get excluded from it, and the outsiders can occasionally be represented by migrants and refugees, towards whom Meloni often lashes out. According to Hobsbawm and McClintock, the family identity leads back to the national identity which is transmitted from generation to generation, from mother to daughter, from daughter to mother; and it is precisely on these understandings that Giorgia Meloni’s intimate politics is based, where through photographs and pop captions presented through the examples of Figures 6-8, she reiterates and emphasises the importance of the family unity, like the national unity that shapes the narrative of the current government.
5. Conclusion
Through the visualisation and the analysis of the posts collected from Giorgia Meloni’s Facebook profile and through the interpretation of the main keywords used on the basis of literature concerning populist parties and nationalist ideology, it is possible to observe how Giorgia Meloni’s communication feeds on modern pop-style images and captions applied to situations typical of intimate politics, which arise similarities and connections with nationalist ideology. Giorgia Meloni’s communication strategy establishes a precise narrative, which unfolds through the frequent recourse to themes such as the traditional family, the Christian faith, the importance of unity and national authority, recalling, albeit in an apparently veiled manner, arguments citing the nationalist doctrine. By extending the investigation to a larger number of posts it is possible to detect similarities and overlapping features among the posts published on the Prime Minister’s Facebook profile, which, if categorised, can lay the groundwork for a defined framework of epithets, arguments, and rhetorical figures capable of circumscribing Giorgia Meloni’s propaganda and political communication to the field of intimate politics. It is undeniable that a clear nationalist motif is embedded within the posts, the same one that in other words is reported and debated within the Italian parliamentary chambers. A further deepening of the subject, as well as a major risk of the current research, refers to the analysis of the Fratelli d’Italia leader’s public speeches, which, due to their content and length, while lending to a more structured linguistic analysis, might also constitute an obstacle to a linear and logical semantic categorisation.
NOTES
1YouTrend, Il 2020 dei leader politici italiani sui social, by Fanpage Karma. In YouTrend.
2Data retrieved from Facebook, 20.02.2023.
3Data retrieved from Facebook, 20.02.2023.
4Data retrieved from Facebook, 20.02.2023.
5We Are Social, & Hootsuite, & DataReportal. Most popular social media platforms in Italy as of 3rd quarter 2020, by usage reach [Graph]. In Statista.
6English translation: Homeland, Nation, Flag, State and Unity.