The Rise of a New Populist: Monica Macovei's 2.0 Electoral Campaign

The case of Romania can be very useful in understanding the manner in which populism arise and grow strong in the nowadays post-communist part of Europe. Romania’s late and biased modernization, its fast and forced industrialization in the communist period and its traumatic and resentful transition to democracy established a tradition of successful populist parties, before, during and after the communism. 

The main question of our research is to what extend new media, and especially Facebook (the most influent social network in nowadays Romania), contribute to the coagulation of this centrifugal movement and concur to the spread of its ideology. We will try to answer this question by analysing the populist futures of Monica Macovei’s electoral discouse of Facebook, during the presidential campaign in 2014.Our intention is to emphasise the ubiquity of the populist discourse, its ability to adapt to the new media and its capacity to engraft popular discontent.

The gap of information that this paper is willing to fill it refers to the (re)invention of populist movement in the new media public sphere and to deconstruct the mythology structure of this type of discourse. The methodology employed will be text analysis; the corpus will consist in Facebook posts of Monica Macovei official Facebook page during the electoral campaign.