It is not a question of gender! The communication via Facebook between populist leaders and their followers about the elections for the Quirinale

The elections for the Quirinale have shown how much the world of politics is androcentrically oriented, leading the parliamentary debate to reject women candidates systematically. Our study analyzed the language on Facebook of three populist leaders of di#erent political orientation and their followers to verify how inclusive it was towards women competing for the office of President of the Republic. The analysis covered the posts (47, with 2146 words) by Giorgia Meloni (Right-wing), Matteo Salvini (Center-Right-wing), and Giuseppe Conte (Center-Left-wing) on the election of the President of the Republic in the period 1-1/3-2-2022 and the related first four more popular comments of followers (188, with 2481 words). With the Vospec step of Spad-T, applied to both the posts of the three leaders and related comments by followers, we conducted a comparative textual analysis. The results highlighted that Conte is the only one to use inclusive language, naming some of the leading women candidates alongside men, while Meloni and Salvini avoid naming candidates. There is a certain lexical correspondence between their followers, except Conte’s followers, who do not mention any women candidates in the comments. Examples of sentences illustrate the type of language used and its contents.