And the final speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Mārtiņš Pričins, whose focus is on the campaigning of Latvian political parties on Facebook, comparing in particular the 2024 European parliamentary election and the 2026 Latvian national election.
The focus here is also especially on visual communication, and the potentially diverging campaigning styles of new political parties. Facebook (and YouTube) remain the top social media platforms in Latvia, and social media are now also a premier source of news and political information for Latvian users; the overall volume of posting has increased, and over the past ten years or so, textual content and the sharing of external links have declined significantly in favour of image and video content.
But while visuality has therefore already been normalised, the packaging of such content continues to change. Also, some parties have leant into this change much more substantially than others, and for some of them the volume of video content has even declined. Indeed, the current Prime Minister now posts a daily explainer video on the issues of the day, each evening; this leader-centred explanatory campaigning is a new development altogether. (To some extent, this also reduces the visibility and recognisability of other government ministers.)
Parties are also borrowing visual styles from mainstream media, which confuses audiences: they cannot tell whether video is generated by editorially independent media outlets, or by the parties themselves.
