Catalonian Elections

Analysis
Introduction

On November 2012, former president Artur Mas of Catalonia (Spain) was expected to win a landslide political victory that actually turned out to be a bittersweet victory. Despite the fact he did win an election that he scheduled two years ahead of time due to a disagreement with the central government in Madrid, which accused him of trying to exploit the economic crisisas an excuse for why Catalonia has no money, actually backfired on him.

On the day of the elections Artur Mas only “won 50 out of 135 parliamentary seats. A result that was a far cry from the 68-seats “exceptional” majority that his political party hoped to win in order to call for a referendum on Catalonia’s independence”, as stated on BBC News. On several media publications, it is said thatvoters punished him for “trying to shift the debate away from his unpopular austerity measures and other pressing economic issues”.

As Mas continues to set forth with his agenda to make Catalonia independent from Spain, we will analyze the social media channels that were used, the audience and the main message of the campaign. Additionally, we will examine the communication theories that wereapplied to this political campaign and explore possible suggestions on what could’ve been improved.

The channels

Convergència i Unió (CiU) made an intensive use of virtual tools. They have presence in all social networks. Their webpage has direct connections to their accounts of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, making use of each one in an attempt to create buzz for their actions, ideasand initiatives. It is important to remark that all their virtual activity is strictly on Catalan, and they make IT viral just in order to reach the Catalonian speakers. Finally, we have to make a difference between the virtual presence of CiU party and its representative, Artur Mas, because these strategies are separated (he only has a Facebook page).

The twitter campaign of CiU wasdistinguished as the most influential in Catalonian elections by the newspaper ABC. They have 22,889 followers and 16,146 tweets. In comparison with the current Spanish Government, Partido Popular, with 9,627 tweets, their activity is really intense. The hashtags that became trending topics were mostly on favor of Independence: #11s2012 (identify like the Catalan Spring), #freedomforcatalonia (to supportthe Catalan nationalism). It is also interesting to highlight that the majority of reports of CiU are connected with a YouTube video.

Audience

Considering the features of the movement, we can assume that the target audience of the campaign has very high levels of knowledge, engagement and motivation about the topics and the values that the party represents.
 
To this respect, having in mindthe ELM model, we can notice that the main contents of the campaign seem to rely on the central route of persuasion. Along with “Identity” and “Independence”, the main values of all the campaign, a remarkable effort is done to present the “hard” contents of the campaign (programs, speech, debates, etc.). Regarding the peripheral route, the only element used is the flag with the colours ofCatalunya, which is the background of all the online channels of Artur Mas campaign.

Effectiveness

Although CiU won 50 seats of 135 in the Parliament, the campaign was considered unsuccessful. The main slogan of this campaign was “The will of a nation”. The leader of CIU referred in all the speeches about how he was leading Catalonia through its independence process; how Spain wasn’t treatingCatalonia fairly (both at the economical and sociopolitical level), and how CiU was the only option for Catalans.

So why was the campaign considered unsuccessful? There were many reasons; probably the most remarkable one was the shift from the economical and social issues to separatism, which became vital during the campaign. Given the current situation of Spain this was a risky action to take;...