The Middle Region Populism of Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi on Instagram

This paper investigates the Instagram self-presentation of Italian party leaders Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi. Building on the notion that circumstances are crucial to the construction of the self through digital photography, we argue that the two leaders strategically use setting and accompaniment to navigate the demands of their populist self-presentation as “ordinary super leaders”: exceptional celebrity-like personae whose lives remain nonetheless close to those of their constituents. To make our case, we analyze a corpus of images featuring the two leaders posted on their Instagram profiles during 2020 (266 for Meloni and 158 for Renzi). Our findings suggest that Meloni and Renzi alternate and remix celebrity practices of exclusivity, exceptionalism, and everydayness in an attempt to come across as simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary, aspirational and relatable. Inspired by Meyrowitz’s “middle region politics,” we propose the notion of middle region populism to describe how populist leaders leverage the affordances of an image-centric social media platform and the vernacular of internet celebrity to curate an online presence in which they pose as exceptionally charismatic yet ordinary and relatable.