The censure motion initiated by PSD and AUR against the Bolojan Government will be debated and voted on on Tuesday, in the plenary session of the Parliament, but until then both camps have put on a show. The expert in communication strategies Radu Delicote analyzes, for “Adevărul”, the entire political show through the prism of archetypes, where good and absolute evil face off, without giving verdicts. In a battle where the only rule is that there are no rules, with the full support of the hard core of their electorate, the two camps do not hesitate to resort to crude manipulations, all with the aim of winning over the undecided electorate. And for that, they pose either as saviors of the homeland, following the Călin Georgescu model, or as victims of the other’s intrigues.
Ilie Bolojan and Sorin Grindeanu, at the UDMR Congress. PHOTO Inquam / Simion Tataru
The truth: Romania is ready for a new political show, and the actors, the parties from the two camps, are competing for the last hundred meters in a total war. What are the consequences, in terms of the perception of the average citizen, who tries to look at things objectively?
Radu Delicote: For several years already, there is no campaign and pre-campaign. Politics occupies, and it is normal, a large part of the population’s agenda. The advantage is that the target audience, the electorate, the citizens, no matter what term we use, are much more connected to political life and automatically begin to increase slightly but constantly the demands that they have vis-à-vis what the politicians do. And I don’t just mean at the central level, I also mean at the regional, local and so on. The downside is that it deepens the divide between proponents and opponents, between those who choose a camp and those who do not. Overall, it further deepens the extremism in the discourse.
And then, under these conditions, the paradox is that, although you are more connected to what is happening, to the political life, to the political reality that surrounds you, paradoxically you become more distrustful, less realistic, less willing to get involved and even often become very partisan without your will on some subjects that you may not even have any business with.
Absolute “good” and “evil”.
Every political party and politician presents itself as a hero, while the opponent personifies absolute evil, and white and black seem to catch on more than ever with fans, who forget the existence of the color gray. Why so much hatred towards the other with whom you were until yesterday an ally, and in a year, two or five maybe you will be in the same camp again?
All marketing is about emotion, really. And then emotional communication is a much more drastic communication than rational communication.
In emotional communication you have some tactics that you can use when you don’t have a lot of time to create a brand for yourself or set a benchmark for what you want to communicate. How is our case, because at the moment the emotional communication vis-à-vis the event of the motion is very high, because they didn’t even have time from the moment they submitted the motion — one week — to communicate each camp’s perspective and points of view. And then, the most effective tactic is the tactic of the enemy.
You identify an enemy that you relate to, no matter what it’s called, what it looks like, you define it in your terms and you start hitting on it, so that you can actually use the enemy as an event of…either a success of yours at the moment the motion is going on, or a failure of yours that you can relate to in the future and victimize yourself. So the tactic of the common enemy — and mind you it’s common because each camp appeals to popular trust. And it is not specific only to the party leaders, but each party actually transmits the following message, from top to bottom, to the voters:Look, we’re all in this situation. Our enemy affects us in marketing, affects us.” So each camp will at the moment try to be, indeed, above sea level compared to the other camp. This is why I say that, paradoxically, we, the consumers of political news, end up becoming more distrustful of political communication and public communication, because in fact you no longer know what the objective reality is, even if you, the average citizen, are a consumer of political news or not.
Handling on all levels
Can we speak of persuasion, of manipulation in all this discourse with which everyone incites their own electorate and tries to radicalize it?
Of course one can talk about persuasion, but maybe not so much persuasion as mostly manipulation. And surprisingly, manipulation doesn’t have to be a bad thing. But notice where I left off, actually — it’s round and closes at both ends. Manipulation or, let’s call it persuasion — although I’d stick with manipulation — exists and works because the political agenda or political campaign communication is already constant. And then you constantly need these tactics. We are no longer in the time of the governments of the 90s when public communication was hermetically sealed and you only had some kind of public information once in a while about what the Government did or what the Parliament did and that was it.
Now it is much more alive and much more dynamic. The reality is that political actors are much more present in our lives, and in our lives, thanks to social media, we often feel them next to us. And we feel that we are part of it this fighting ring. Which is very tiring and leads to the fact, to a chronic fatigue vis-à-vis the trust you can end up having in public communication.
In this whole motion scenario, who manages to sell the role of “savior” better and who is stuck in the role of “guilty”? Who are the “heroes”, who are the “enemies”?
It is very difficult to give an answer now. It seems to me at the moment that both camps are communicating in extenso. It is one of the big issues that will mislead the citizen, misperceive, because both camps communicate as the savior and both camps communicate as the victim. All equally. So I couldn’t say who communicates better, because although paradoxical we are in the same communication segments — of savior and victim — including Călin Georgescu, as a parenthesis, came out with this system of savior and victim.
And then what would each keep specifically in this battle?
Although each camp has the same savior and victim segment, the irony is that they went for different elements. Each found a different kind of savior, each identified with a different kind of savior, and each communicated to a different kind of potential victim. So who will communicate better, I don’t know. Truly, here only the sentiment analysis vis-à-vis the consumers of their target audience can answer, can indicate us.
Why so much violence in language
Can all this very violent language and all this antagonism in public statements be translated as a sign of strategic strength or evidence of panic and lack of ideas in communicating with one’s own electorate and with the neutral one?
And, and. And, and, because regardless of whether you have to project strength—because if you project strength and success, and success is projected through strength most of the time—you’re actually attracting more supporters overall. It’s The Bandwagon Effect in communication. The Bandwagon Effect theory. We don’t have a word-for-word translation, that would be the theory that people like and always try to get into the “carriage” of the winner. That is, people will always go with the one they see as the winner and will always support them. In other words, people resonate with the person they see as a winner.
OK, but to what extent can this reach, appeal to an undecided audience?
If you are present in the public debate, you are there. You are in the citizen’s agenda. The citizen doesn’t forget you, essentially. And that’s a big problem. This is again a paradox, because, although it is an extremely beneficial thing for the public reality, for the political agora, for the presence of the politician in the citizen’s life, in fact, the ironic thing is that this presence does not have relevant elements for the citizen.
Radu Delicote. PHOTO: Facebook
We are not discussing public policy today. We are not discussing realism. We are not discussing success in the coming years. We don’t discuss a plan for the next 3-4-5 months every day. We do not discuss elements of local politics that help the citizen to improve his life in one way or another. Not. We’re just talking about the table.
And then it counts and helps in this whole ensemble of messages, of sounds, if you will—a discordant orchestra. We are currently living in a concert, a discordant orchestra where each instrument plays a different score, and the audience is forced to choose which instrument they like. That’s all. And it will matter when we have elections which instrument was present in the public’s life or not. It’s called communication relevance, whether it was there or not.
Non-stop election campaign
Today’s politician chases 24 hours out of 24 and 7 days out of 7 after the audience, after the electorate, but what does it matter that we are far, in theory, from election campaign?
It doesn’t matter if it’s a campaign or not, it doesn’t matter when it will be, in how many years. It matters as a politician that you are there, because all communication is electoral. And in recent years there are no more deadlines. Of course we would be tempted to say that there are still three years until the elections, yes, I agree, but look, thanks to social media, thanks to the inflated political agenda, we actually end up not realizing how much time is left until the elections and we end up perceiving everything as if the elections could be the very next morning, as in the routine questions: “Who would you vote for if there were elections next morning?”.
In such a situation, a warlike perpetuum mobile awaits us, regardless of the outcome of the motion?
Exact. Obviously each camp works with scenarios: what happens in scenario A, what happens in scenario B and so on. But regardless of what happens tomorrow, the war continues and no one is finished, no one is definitively victorious. There is no conclusion. We don’t wait for the motion to fail or the motion to pass and that’s it, all of a sudden it will calm the waters. No, the war will continue unabated until certain interests cause them to ally themselves again. Until then, it will only be political war, to the delight of some.
