Spain’s grassroots parties show how smart use of the social networks can win elections
Spain held local and regional elections on May 24, in which the country’s traditional two-party system was severely disrupted (if not changed for ever) by the appearance of two news grass-roots parties, Podemos and Ciudadanos, which in some areas attracted up to a quarter of the vote. Despite limited resources, they were able to rally support through skillful and imaginative use of the social networks.
What is particularly important here is that these new parties understand that the social networks are a two-way street, and that the old approach of simply using them as digital election leaflets is a waste of time. We can see this changing approach in the United States with Barack Obama’s decision to open the @POTUS Twitter account, which attracted a million followers in just five hours, and that will be passed on to his successor in the White House when he leaves office. His own account, @Barack Obama was never updated by him, as he admitted in November 2009.
Last week’s elections in Spain were the first in which the social networks played a decisive role. Some parties got it right, others didn’t: the ruling Popular Party launched #VotaPP, which was then swamped with tweets from opposition supporters. Cristina Cifuentes, the PP’s candidate to run the regional government of Madrid, had a go at using Periscope, with mixed results. Without doubt, the left-leaning supporters of Podemos made the best use of the social networks, and one of their candidates, Manuela Carmena, could become mayor of Madrid if she can win the support of the Socialist Party to form a coalition.
That said, using the social networks is no guarantee of success in itself. A party’s electoral result depends on its strategy (centralized or decentralized, etc), the quality of the message, how receptive voters are to using them, and to what extent the social networks have been an integral part of its overall communication strategy (as with Podemos) from the get go.
Another key factor is the quantity and quality of the dialogue: success depends on being able to answer people’s questions, which isn’t always possible. This is where we see the connection between the social networks and politics, which in my opinion is central to understanding what happened in Spain’s elections: with such a radically bi-directional media, parties that simply use the social networks to send their message out, as was largely the case with the PP — which has enjoyed an absolute majority in Congress since taking office in January 2012, and whose leader, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, avoids speaking in public — can’t expect to garner much interest from the public. The main opposition Socialist Party is still largely stuck in the past as well, essentially seeing politics as “first we win the elections, then we govern.” In short, all is fair in elections and war.
And of course once the votes are in, Spain main parties have traditionally betrayed their electoral promises pretty much along the lines of “I have to govern and what’s more now I have the most votes, I can do so.” What the two main parties are now waking up to is that simply winning votes doesn’t entitle a government to implement any measures, but instead only those measures it said it would implement during the campaign. Spain’s democracy has been eroded over the years by successive administrations taking a “the end justifies the means” approach.
Facebook played a big role in the Spanish elections, hosting a huge amount of content, while in the run up to voting, and on election day itself, Twitter was used by the parties to rally support from the large numbers of undecided voters. Twitter users are 23 percent more interested in politics than the average internet user, it has emerged. But the relationship between the outcome of the elections — a battering for the ruling party — and the number of Twitter conversations is no coincidence: what mattered here was the extent to which the new political forces engaged with voters, giving them a clear advantage.
Twitter is increasingly the place where the political debate is taking place in Spain. The country’s main sociological research center, the CIS, says there is a 95 percent correlation between undecided votes and the number of Twitter followers of parties in the running. Twitter represents all demographics and political affiliations, although not all follow the same use patterns. What’s more, what happens on television is immediately reflected on Twitter, effectively making it a parallel channel where users are commenting in real time on the debates taking place on their television sets: parties that take part in such programs multiply by eight the number of new followers per hour during the broadcast.
We are entering a period in which we will see how Twitter, due to its immediacy and effectiveness will become the channel parties and politicians use to get their message over, twentyfourseven. We have already seen numerous examples of using tweets to put forward proposals, which are then answered with counter proposals, and we will see much, much more of this in the coming years. Twitter is a new way of politicking, and it is clear that not all parties or politicians are ready for it. And one of the reasons is that Twitter means politicians have to be coherent. Parties that simply talk at the electorate, or take decisions once in office that were not spelled out during the campaign, or that push through policies on the basis of an absolute majority will be punished in the ballot box. As we in Spain have just seen.
(En español, aquí)
