The challenge during the election campaigns will be to not fall into the trap of polarised politics like in other countries, says Sven Clement. Matic Zorman / Maison Moderne

The challenge during the election campaigns will be to not fall into the trap of polarised politics like in other countries, says Sven Clement. Matic Zorman / Maison Moderne

Co-founder of the Luxembourg Pirate Party, Sven Clement argues that social media will be more important than ever in next year’s local and national elections, but that political parties, candidates and voters should remain cautious and vigilant about its use in campaigns.

In 2008 a senator from Illinois made waves during the US presidential election with his use of social media as a tool to rally the masses with a positive message. Eight years later, his successor in the White House showed us the other extreme of how social media can be (ab-)used.

It is no wonder that politicians of all affiliations took notice of the emergence of social media as a platform for campaigning over the first decade of this millennium. The consequence was that elections fought in the second decade mostly focused on one platform. Depending on demography, the names of the platforms and formats used in campaigns differed slightly, but every politician needed to be at least present on the local behemoth. For Europe and Luxembourg this has mostly been Facebook.

We are currently experiencing platforms that are much more diverse, each addressing a specific subset of the population and having different codes and usage patterns. Facebook is still the gorilla when it comes to reach and ease-of-use to address large swaths of the electoral population. Yet, other platforms have emerged that will play a role in the upcoming elections. Whether it is Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram or Snapchat, there is no longer one single platform with which you could reach all strata of the electoral population. To makes matters worse for us politicians, each platform not only addresses a different audience but also has its own customs and codes of usage.

Politicians and their campaigns now need to be vigilant, not to stretch their campaign too thin while still reaching their electorate in an efficient way. Sure, part of that can be done by spending ever more money on paid-for reach-through ads, but is that sustainable?

Deluge of data

At the same time, Luxembourg’s proportional system means that every campaign is confronted not only with one spokesperson but with 60 different candidates who might use the platforms in wildly different ways.

We will see a different use of social media in the upcoming elections. The lead candidates will mostly have professional appearances on the most important platforms for their constituents while maybe neglecting those where they would receive too much negative feedback. Their co-candidates will probably align their social media use with what the national campaigns favour, if only to be able to reuse material easily. The national campaign offices at the same time will be confronted by a deluge of data and activity from their candidates which needs to be screened--including comments by voters--to make sure that a campaign can stay on message. Because of the pervasiveness of social media this will probably take a new dimension for campaigns.

Voters will also have a key role to play to keep campaigns honest and point out if their message starts to be different from one platform to the other. We already see this in action on social media with voters showing the stark differences between what MPs are saying and doing or what one MP from a party says while another says the opposite.

Social media will complement other communication channels and as in the past mostly facilitate broadcast electoral messages while lowering the barrier to contact individual politicians. I foresee that many more voters will directly engage with their favoured or disliked candidates, and it will be up to the candidates on how they will react to that.

The challenge for society will be to keep our humanity. To not fall into the trap of polarised politics like in other countries. And always make sure that our proportional, consensus, or at least compromise-oriented, political system can play to its strengths. Surely the opposition needs to be a bit more polarising than the current governing majority but factfulness and capacity to find common ground after the elections should not be thrown out the virtual window.

Sven Clement is the public face of the Luxembourg Pirate Party. A co-founder and its first president, he was elected to parliament at the last general elections in 2018. He is now the party’s honorary chairman. Clement has regularly figured in the top 10 in opinion polls asking about the popularity and competence of Luxembourg politicians.

An alternate version of this article first appeared in the of Delano magazine.