If for every election there were the Academy Awards, then this year Carlo Calenda would certainly be awarded the Oscar for best supporting actor. The founder and leader of Action lost the challenge for the Capitol, taking home, however, the distinction of having headed the most voted list in Rome which collected an amazing 19.06% and a patrol of 4 municipal councilors.
Action broke the list of the Democratic Party, which collected just over 16%, and that of the Brothers of Italy which came second overall with 17.42% of the votes.
Yet Calenda deserves the golden statuette not so much for the result itself, but rather for how it managed, among all the candidates competing in Rome, as well as comparatively in Milan and Naples, to use and exploit Twitter making it for long periods the privileged channel of his electoral communication.
A company that is not at all simple, which acquires the right value if we consider at least two elements: unlike Facebook and Instagram, which can be considered older sisters in terms of the number of subscribers, the platform launched by Jack Dorsey for some years has banned globally sponsored advertisements with a political theme and, secondly, today it is the social network that manages to aggregate a user – who in Italy has an average age of 32 – that we could define as more thinking, just consider that about a quarter of all verified accounts belongs to reporters.
The proofs of this happy marriage between Carlo Calenda and Twitter are already in the record numbers that he managed to collect from 1 August to 1 November. The chirping performances of Carlo Calenda are nothing short of amazing for a leader who for the most part in the last year has verticalized all his communicative efforts exclusively on Rome and the challenge for the Campidoglio.
We start with the million interactions , with 2 thousand tweets in just 90 days that totaled the beauty of 930 thousand likes and an absolute growth of another 11 thousand followers compared to the over 300 who already followed the profile.
The success of vanity metrics, which in politics it is appropriate to remember, retains only a perceptive or ointment function for the egotism of the leader and his fans, as it has a specific weight in terms of very uncertain consensus, and was built on a precise editorial choice made by Calenda. A mixture that he has been able to combine without ever overdoing it, in form as well as in content, the private with the public, the emotionality and instinct with political reason, authenticity with conventionality.
On the one hand, he showed without reservations or hesitation the courage and audacity of the commander in chief by attacking head-on and with a style that quickly became recognizable the politicians, the media and journalists who in his view were rowing against him, as well as on the other hand, he has repeatedly allowed himself intentional violations to more private and intimate moments that have been socialized without falling into the hypocrisy of cliches.
The examples of the tweets for Marcel Jacbos’ Olympic medal in the final of the 100 meters, as well as the trio of tweets with photos that bring his marriage, the real one, in the electoral campaign posted after the results of the polls (man object), at closing of the electoral campaign (the kiss on the stage) and for the birthday of his wife (my girlfriend turns her birthday) are only among those who obtained the greatest number of interactions of the period that testify to a style that we could almost define at the Calenda.
In these three months, the story of the good boy has mixed, like water with flour to knead good bread, with that of the wildest of the Gian Burrasca who is not afraid to take to the streets to fight. On this front, there are dozens of pungent posts, but let’s take only six of those that obviously have obtained a decent result in terms of total interactions.
Here, in the midst of the August holidays he does not skimp on a perfidious and sarcastic tweet to attack the Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio portrayed at the sea together with Francesco Boccia and Michele Emiliano while the Taliban enter Kabul in Afghanistan.
In October, however, Carlo Calenda tries to remove a few pebbles from his shoes and first focuses on Corriere della Sera, with the tweet of October 5, then continues with Giuseppe Conte , on October 7, still to follow there is more for Marco Labor and we are on the 11th of October and on the 18th he dedicates himself to Vittorio Feltri .
In the transformation from the good guy to the politician who takes on the most personal or delicate situations head on, there is the constant of a language that breaks the mold of conventional grammar, which is not afraid of being direct, incisive, sarcastic and vulgar, if necessary. A language that must be strenuously functional to the underlying narrative of electoral communication that tells of a politician who is “serious”. This too does not spare the most aggressive adjectives in tweets on several occasions: ignoble, scoundrels, cowards, criminals.
With the administrative elections, Rome and Italy experienced the Calenda chirping for the first time.