Personalisation, Populism, and Popularisation in the European Elections of 2014: The Italian case

As a result of the peculiar political conditions at the time, the 2014 European elections represented an unusual mixture of consolidated electoral practices and innovative campaign strategies. For the three competing leaders, Matteo Renzi, Beppe Grillo, and Silvio Berlusconi, the result of the polls posed an objective of vital importance and called for election campaign communication formulas which, in spite of their differences, were made up of combinations of the same three basic ingredients: personalization of leadership, populist rhetoric, and popularization of politics. Analysed within a setting of identical television conditions, this research identifies the three leaders’ key strategy elements from a qualitative analysis of their linguistic communication in the TV political talk show Porta a Porta, transmitted a few days before the vote.