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Campaigning on Facebook in the 2019 European Parliament Election pp 151–168Cite as

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The 2019 EP Election in Italy: A ‘Titanic’ Victory for Salvini’s League

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Part of the Political Campaigning and Communication book series (PCC)

Abstract

The 2019 European election in Italy had a distinctive national impact, given the pivotal role played by Matteo Salvini’s League, back then in government with the Five Star Movement (M5S). Both parties campaigned to highlight their influence on core issues within the government coalition. The League dominated the online campaign producing an outstanding number of Facebook posts (3,231) and reporting great levels of engagement (second only to the M5S). The ‘titanic’ success obtained by the League in the polls prompted a political crisis, which led to a new government coalition between the M5S and the centre-left Democratic Party.

Keywords

  • Italy
  • European Parliament election
  • Facebook
  • Election campaign
  • Mobilisation

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-73851-8_10
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Fig. 10.1
Fig. 10.2

Notes

  1. 1.

    Newman et al. (2020).

  2. 2.

    Salvini’s account published 742 posts generating massive engagement: on average, 10,600 reactions, 1100 ‘shares’ and 2000 ‘comments’ per post.

  3. 3.

    On average, 29% of posts were coded under ‘Other Political Topics’. This residual category aggregates very different observations: from micro-level policies that could not be consistently connected to macro-policies to general political topics used to redirect followers to other sources of information. This partially includes references to non-policy-related valence issues.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Andrea Ceron

  2. NASP—Network for the Advancement of Social and Political Studies, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Margherita Bordignon & Giovanni Pagano

Authors
  1. Andrea Ceron
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  2. Margherita Bordignon
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  3. Giovanni Pagano
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andrea Ceron .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Media and Communication, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Dr. Jörg Haßler

  2. Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway

    Assoc. Prof. Melanie Magin

  3. Department of Communication, FHWien der WKW University of Applied Sciences for Management & Communication, Vienna, Austria

    Prof. Dr. Uta Russmann

  4. Department of Language Theory and Communication Science, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Assoc. Prof. Vicente Fenoll

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Ceron, A., Bordignon, M., Pagano, G. (2021). The 2019 EP Election in Italy: A ‘Titanic’ Victory for Salvini’s League. In: Haßler, J., Magin, M., Russmann, U., Fenoll, V. (eds) Campaigning on Facebook in the 2019 European Parliament Election. Political Campaigning and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73851-8_10

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