No abstract

This paper investigates the Instagram self-presentation of Italian party leaders Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi. Building on the notion that circumstances are crucial to the construction of the self through digital photography, we argue that the two leaders strategically use setting and accompaniment to navigate the demands of their populist self-presentation as “ordinary super leaders”: exceptional celebrity-like personae whose lives remain nonetheless close to those of their constituents. To make our case, we analyze a corpus of images featuring the two leaders posted on their Instagram profiles during 2020 (266 for Meloni and 158 for Renzi). Our findings suggest that Meloni and Renzi alternate and remix celebrity practices of exclusivity, exceptionalism, and everydayness in an attempt to come across as simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary, aspirational and relatable. Inspired by Meyrowitz’s “middle region politics,” we propose the notion of middle region populism to describe how populist leaders leverage the affordances of an image-centric social media platform and the vernacular of internet celebrity to curate an online presence in which they pose as exceptionally charismatic yet ordinary and relatable.

Over the last decade, social media became an indispensable tool for political campaigning for populist political leaders, who successfully used social media to circumvent traditional media elite and establish a seemingly direct relationship with their constituents. Based on this premises and adopting the lens of “digital populism”, our study presents a visual analysis of the portraits and candid shots posted on Instagram by two Italian populist party leaders: Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi. Specifically, we explore a corpus of 424 images featuring the two leaders and posted on their respective profiles during 2020 (266 for Meloni, 158 for Renzi). Our analysis mostly focuses on a crucial semiotic feature of these images: setting. Recognizing that digital photography contributes to the mutual construction of self and space, we argue that the Renzi and Meloni strategically use setting to negotiate the inherent tension between their status as celebrity politicians and the “claim to ordinariness” typical of their populist political style. Thus, we claim that the two leaders navigate this tension by selectively posting images set “on stage” (e.g., while being interviewed during a talk show), “behind the scenes” (e.g., while working in their office), or on an “intimate stage” (e.g., on a day hike with their family). In our conclusions we reflect on the notion that populism is endemic in Italian politics, suggesting its digital manifestations take different shapes depending on political narratives that charismatic leaders construct for themselves through different mixes of celebrity and micro-celebrity practices.