Politicians Turn Influencers in Albanian ‘Online Election’

"Politicians have turned into influencers and they compete for attention with prominent actors or famous bloggers," said Blendi Salaj, a media analyst and morning host at local CNN-affiliate A2 TV. "They post constantly to attract attention, to generate engagement, but not necessarily to communicate their political message."

The flight was the first to the Kukes airport, which is still under construction. But it was Rama who stole the show, broadcasting the carefully-choreographed video live on his Facebook page. It was viewed more than 1.6 million times, making it the social media post that garnered the most interaction from any candidate running in the April 25 election.

Amid strict COVID-19 restrictions, social media more than ever became an essential tool of communication for parties and individual candidates during the election. And it was Rama's winning Socialist Party that was most active, according to a data analysis by BIRN.

In the race to influence as many voters online as possible, there were a total of 25,000 posts on the 298 Facebook pages of election candidates between March 26 and the eve of the vote, April 24, or an average of 819 per day.

Using Crowdtangle, a social media analysis application owned by Facebook, BIRN found that candidates of the ruling Socialist Party had more social media interaction with their followers than their rivals from the opposition centre-right Democratic Party.

The social media pages of Socialist Party candidates registered 9.72 million combined interactions on Facebook during the election campaign, followed by the Democrats with 8.76 million interactions and the Socialist Movement for Integration with 576,333.

On Instagram, the Socialists were again ahead, with 2.6 million...