Rome 2016. Populist rhetoric in a post-ideological City Election

City Elections in Rome represent a perfect case study to analyse dynamics in political actors’ communication strategies reflecting, in many ways, those of national politics. Among these, a key role is played by the use of populist rhetoric. Although populism and the elements that make a political communication strategies “populist” are hardly definable in an unequivocal way, there are some facts we can consider as established. First, the connection between the weakening of traditional ties between parties and voters on the one side (Mair, 2005), and hybridization of the media system on the other (Chadwick, 2013) took to a condition of candidate-centered politics, and to a more and more radicalized personalization of the leadership (McAllister, 2007; Karvonen, 2010). Second, a leader’s communication style can be analysed focusing on two key elements (Campus, 2016): how he/she chose to appeal to the people (strictly linked to the going public strategy, Kernell, 2007) and how he/she chose to make his/her private life a part of his/her political action (strictly linked to the process of popularization of politics; Mazzoleni & Sfardini, 2009). Third, the populist rhetoric, that is a key element of both the above mentioned strategies, dominate contemporary political debate, independently from the political orientation of the leaders on the stage (Mancini, 2016; Diamanti, 2014). Fourth, the use of a populist rhetoric highly conforms to the persistent centrality of television as a key platform for political debate, and makes of “tele-populism” a more and more interesting field of study (Taguieff, 2003). So, in the same words of the candidates for mayor of Rome, it is possible to find some more or less evident traces of anti-political and populist rhetoric, focusing on some of the major aspects of it: the appeal to the people; the tendency to create a huge contrast between first-person singular and first-person plural to create identification with the audience and the links of the latter strategy with that of creating Manichean images of politics as a war between “us” and” them”; the relationships with the political forces supporting the candidate and with their different ideologies; the referring to the addressee of political communication as “citizen” or “voters” rather than “people” or “folks”; the positive or negative referring to political institutions. The main author already worked on these dimensions, trying to identify the main elements of personalization, popularization and populist rhetoric in the TV discourses of the most visible political leaders through ten years of European elections (Ruggiero, 2015). In this paper, the same definition of the corpus will be maintained, working on TV talk shows as the source of the wider representation of the narration of politics, involving the leaders in the working mechanisms of every single format through the necessary adhesion to its narrative structures (Ruggiero, 2014; Novelli, 2016). Again, the potentialities of the analysis of television political discourse (Iyengar, 1994; Jones, 2005; Fairclough, 2014) will be put to the test, but broadening the field of research from political talks to infotainment formats and to some of the fully entertaining ones, looking for the presence of the candidates for mayor of Rome in every talk show scheduled on the seven national broadcasts within 30 days before the elections, in line with the growing importance of the popularization of politics. Lastly, an important element will be the context of a competition that effectively leads to the election of a monocratic office, and is the perfect field to test the state of the art of those interpretive tools developed to analyse personalized politics and political changing in Italy starting from City elections (Calise, 2000). We expect to find some rate of populist rhetoric in the television discourses of all of the considered candidates (Stefano Fassina, Roberto Giachetti, Alfio Marchini, Giorgia Meloni, Virginia Raggi), but the peculiar position that each of them holds in this specific circumstance makes it an unmissable occasion to analyse the different uses they will do of it, with particular attention to the dynamics of personalization in terms of unbounding from the reference parties. In fact, the candidates represent several key elements of the Italian political condition, that could reflect on the next General elections: Giachetti is actually the candidate of the Democratic Party, the first party in Italy, but having the support of many other forces (Greens and Radicals) he chose not to use the party’s symbol; the position of Marchini is similar, since he is a kind of last-minute representor of Berlusconi’s party, having the leader of Forza Italia turned his endorsement from Guido Bertolaso to the leader of a party that used to be “personal”; Fassina runs to demonstrate the possibilities of the left opposition to stimulate votes of belonging; on the other side of the political spectrum, Meloni tries to keep together the traditional right electorate with that referring to the populist and ethnocentric party Lega; Raggi is the outsider, and she has the arduous task to defend the Five Star Movement’s reputation in a time in which it is threatened by scandals having place in the same local administrations that represented the most successful demonstration of the Movement’s “good politics” (think about the accuses of bribery and corruption to the Major of Parma Federico Pizzarotti). Since one of the main functions of populist rhetoric is to highline the bounds between each leader and his/her party, and underline the importance of his/her personal relationship with the electorate, this specific scenario foresees both a huge use of it and a chance to analyse its strategical value in the post-ideological competitions.