The Middle Region Populism of Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi on Instagram

This paper investigates the Instagram self-presentation of Italian party leaders Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi. Building on the notion that circumstances are crucial to the construction of the self through digital photography, we argue that the two leaders strategically use setting and accompaniment to navigate the demands of their populist self-presentation as “ordinary super leaders”: exceptional celebrity-like personae whose lives remain nonetheless close to those of their constituents. To make our case, we analyze a corpus of images featuring the two leaders posted on their Instagram profiles during 2020 (266 for Meloni and 158 for Renzi). Our findings suggest that Meloni and Renzi alternate and remix celebrity practices of exclusivity, exceptionalism, and everydayness in an attempt to come across as simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary, aspirational and relatable. Inspired by Meyrowitz’s “middle region politics,” we propose the notion of middle region populism to describe how populist leaders leverage the affordances of an image-centric social media platform and the vernacular of internet celebrity to curate an online presence in which they pose as exceptionally charismatic yet ordinary and relatable. Over the last decade, populist leaders of all political brands have effectively used social media to circumvent traditional media elites and establish “direct” relationships with their publics of followers–constituents (Bartlett et al. 2011; Engesser et al. 2017a). Many such leaders have social media followings comparable to those of celebrities and oftentimes perform celebrity-like personae that borrow the vernacular of mainstream media celebrities and social media influencers (Ekman and Widholm 2017; Lalancette and Raynauld 2017). The celebrity practices (Marwick and boyd 2011) adopted by politicians are a prime site to explore the visual politics of populism and account for two seemingly contradictory aspects of the populist political style (Moffitt 2022): the claim that the leader is “one of the people” and the parallel claim that the leader embodies “the will of the people” because of their extraordinary charisma (Casullo and Colalongo 2022). In this paper, we explore the Instagram self-presentation of Italian party leaders Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi and identify some of the strategies that populist leaders devise to navigate this tension. Building on the notion that the circumstances of a representation (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996) are crucial to the construction of the self through digital photography (Koliska and Roberts 2021), we argue that Meloni and Renzi strategically use setting and accompaniment to pose as “super leaders” whose lives are nonetheless ordinary like those of their constituents (Mazzoni and Mincigrucci 2021). Taking inspiration from Meyrowitz’s (1986) veteran work on the mediatization of celebrity, we show that Meloni and Renzi construct their digital personas as simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary by alternating and remixing the repertoires of the “everyday” and the “superstar” celebrity politician (Wood et al. 2016), with most of their self-presentation taking place in the middle region between the two. To make our case, we rely on an analysis of the locations depicted in Meloni’s and Renzi’s pictures and the people that accompany them. In particular, we seek to answer the following research questions: Where are Meloni’s and Renzi’s Instagram images set (circumstances of location) and who is in those pictures with them (circumstances of accompaniment)? How do circumstances support the self-presentation of these leaders as ordinary citizens or extraordinary politicians? The rest of the paper is structured as follows. In the literature review, we introduce the notion of celebrity as practice (Marwick and boyd 2011) and populism as a political style (Moffitt and Tormey 2014), linking them to Meyrowitz’s (1986) pivotal work on the “middle region” between the Goffmanian frontstage and backstage. Thereafter, we discuss the “elective affinity” between populism and social media (Gerbaudo 2018; Hopster 2021), suggesting that Instagram’s platform vernacular (Gibbs et al. 2015) and the modalities to achieve fame therein (Abidin 2018) represent key affordances that enable politicians to perform their celebrity on a spectrum between “everyday” and “superstar” leadership styles (Wood et al. 2016). After situating these theories in the Italian context and introducing our case study, we present our methods, which involve a content analysis of the six main genres of self-presentation shared by Meloni and Renzi on their Instagram profiles in 2020 followed by a social semiotic close reading of images based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) established methodology. After summarizing our findings, we discuss their implications, suggesting that Renzi and Meloni do not simply alternate between exceptionalism and everydayness, but also mix performative elements from both styles of internet celebrity. We dub this phenomenon middle region populism and suggest that politicians adopt hybrid modes of self-presentation to navigate the duality inherent to the ideal type of the ordinary super leader.