Electoral Propaganda Through Televised Fiction: The Online Communication During 2019 Spanish General Elections

Introduction

Television shows have been experiencing huge growth in recent years, hand-in-hand with the international success of at-home video on demand services, such as HBO or Netflix. The quality and quantity of these shows provokes continuous conversation among the viewers who make up the fan community for these media products. In addition, titles such as House of Cards Willimon, 2013-2018), Game of Thrones (Benioff & Weiss, 2011-2019), or The Handmaid’s Tale (Miller, 2017-) are ideologically charged, which at times suggests the identification on the small screen of real political characters, ideas or parties. In this regard, social media is the ideal space to express this imagined representation, as occurred in the case of Spain during the 2019 national elections (see Baños Mafud, 2019).

What is certain is that the solid construction of these fictional characters, who generate such enthusiasm on social media, does not go unnoticed by the political class itself. Using their official accounts, politicians include allusions to these popular references in their campaign plans as a new way to connect with the fan community. This fact forms part of the current digital era in which the candidate shows their more personal side on social media, thereby gaining authenticity among their followers (see Enli & Rosenberg, 2018). For example, Donald Trump did so on certain occasions with Game of Thrones on Twitter (Heritage, 2019), and in Spain, Isabel Serra, the Podemos candidate for the Autonomous Community of Madrid in the elections for the autonomous regions in 2019, also used the show in her campaign (el Diario, 2019). In Spanish politics, the strategy of using mass culture as part of political communication in general and of electoral propaganda in particular has been especially common since there was a surge of new parties.

The electoral campaign in question began in a context in which the emergence of new parties since the European Parliament elections of 2014 created a new political panorama in Spain that ended the traditional two-party system. Accordingly, until 2014, the Spanish government and those of its autonomous regions and local authorities had been in the hands of the Partido Popular (PP), made up of a wide range of right-wing politicians, or of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), traditionally connected to the centre-left. However, from the European elections onwards, the left-wing Podemos party appeared in strength on the electoral scene (at times forming a coalition named Unidas Podemos with the pre-existing communist Izquierda Unida party), followed shortly after by the Ciudadanos party, which originally self-defined as social-democratic but would later describe itself as liberal-progressive. They became the third and fourth most-popular political forces in the general elections of 2015 and 2016. More recently, the far-right VOX party has achieved significant parliamentary representation in response to the new wave of national patriotism that has emerged as a reaction to the Catalan independence movement. These five political forces, led by five men (Pedro Sánchez of the PSOE, Pablo Casado of the PP, Pablo Iglesias of Unidas Podemos, Albert Rivera of Ciudadanos and Santiago Abascal of VOX), stood as candidates for the general election of 28 April 2019 (referred to as 28A), called by Pedro Sánchez, who had become president a year prior after winning a vote of no confidence against the PP.

This much anticipated electoral period took place from 12 to 26 April and, based on the exemplified increase in the overlap between mass culture and propaganda, the aim of this research is to understand the propagandistic use that each party or candidate for the presidency of the Government of Spain in 2019 made of fictional discourse on social media, studying the parallels established between the party’s ideology and that proposed in fiction.