Judit Takács

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a challenging and unprecedented situation for mankind in several fields. The organisation and conduct of elections shall not be an exception either. Since the spring of 2020 countries have been faced with new questions and obstacles, to which their electoral systems cannot always provide a proper answer. One of the many challenges in connection to the elections is related to campaigning. It has become demanding for candidates in all countries that have held elections since the outbreak of the coronavirus to reach their voters, as always new restrictions have been introduced by the governments to minimize spread of the virus.

These measures usually affected the freedom of assembly or the freedom of movement, both of which are in close connection with election campaigns. In several countries public gatherings were limited to a certain amount of people or completely banned for a time, and it was also quite usual especially in 2020 and 2021, to introduce curfew or obligate people to spend a certain amount of days under mandatory quarantine in their homes for instance. Under such circumstances political parties and candidates had to find new ways to inform the citizens about their political programmes especially when the elections approached . The structure of electoral campaigns will be assessed more deeply by later deliverables of our research project, but some points will be highlighted in this initial stage of the region-wide discussion

The solution tot he aforementioned challenges was to pay more attention to online platforms, use social media and organise virtual events, in other words, move and reconsider several campaign activities in the context of the virtual sphere. Of course presence in all sectors of media as well as remote communication had been vital for political parties before the pandemic too, since television, social media platforms or simple political ads on websites make it considerably more effective to increase the number of people that a candidate can reach. So the tendency that online campaigning has been gaining a more and more significant role shall not be evaluated as a new one. The Covid-related restrictions just accelerated a still extisting and fastly emerging trend: the focus is shifting from offline campaign events to being present on social media platforms or introducing political ads on YouTube for instance. Just to give a few examples: due to the pandemic political parties organised e-rallies on Facebook or Instagram (eg. Singapore), or even held party conventions online (eg. USA). Platforms like Twitter, WhatsApp or Zoom also became a lot more popular in the election campaigns, just like radio talk show and political advertising.

Apart from the geographically distant examples, this pattern could also be detected in those V4 countries which have held general elections since the beginning of the pandemic. In the first round of the 2020 Polish presidential election in-person campaign activities were limited to a certain number of participants, so the candidates mostly used the broadcast and online media to reach the voters. Traditional outdoor canvassing became a lot less significant. Nonetheless, later in the campaign the candidates organised several offline meetings with a large number of participants as well.

During the campaign of  2021 Czech parliamentary elections most of the candidates decided to only organise meetings with strictly reduced number of participants instead of holding large events, although there were no specific COVID-19 measures or ban on rallies in force regarding the election campaign. Social media, especially Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, and paid online advertisements had a dominant role in disseminating the views of candidates and candidating parties. However, in smaller towns the candidates focused more on direct interaction, like door-to-door canvassing.

Though the 2022 Hungarian elections were held after most COVID-19 related restrictions had been lifted, presence in the online media still had a defining part in the election campaign as well as during the campaign of the oppositional primary elections. Of course the means of indoor forums, door-to-door and small scale street campaigning were used by the political parties, but they relied heavily on social media, paid online advertisements and television presence too to approach the voters. Besides, political parties also tried to reach citizens via text messages, telephone or e-mail, which has not been unknown before the pandemic, but used in a more sistematic way in the first post-Covid electoral campaign of the country.

The rapidly strenghtening role of online platforms in electoral campaigns should be conceptualized on a more detailed way to understand better especially the exact impact of the pandemic by changing the preferred communication methods of people. This contribution highlighted some basic concerns about these tendencies which will be examined further during the forthcoming stages of our one-year-long research project.

April 2022

__________________________________________________________

The views expressed above belong to the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Centre for Social Sciences.