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Tiredness, fear, anger

2022-05-05T11:21:14.846Z


Political action today consists of generating emotions (often negative) that function as electoral fuel


In the French presidential elections, a significant penetration of the vote for Marine Le Pen was observed in rural areas, in some cases ahead of Macron.

It is surprising that agrarian France is where the best results have been obtained by a candidate who displayed a clearly Eurosceptic discourse, if not directly Europhobic.

It is surprising because it is precisely European policies, specifically the Common Agrarian Policy, that maintain the French countryside (and that of so many other member countries).

If French voters in rural areas had voted according to their interests, the most consistent thing would be for them to have mostly opted for a candidacy that did not endanger community subsidies, in this case Macron's.

The reason for the decantation of the French countryside towards Le Pen is not found in the defense of interests, but in the expression of a feeling that the candidate of the extreme right was able to place at the center of the electoral debate.

It is the fear of rural France of losing its essence, of being engulfed by the globalization that cities and the European Union itself embody, the one that provides the French countryside with its sustenance.

The countryside feels attacked and that feeling became electoral ammunition in favor of Le Pen.

This is an example of how, for some time now, politics has ceased to gravitate on interests to do so on feelings and emotions.

It is not new.

Sentimental politics has been expressing itself for a long time.

In fact, politics has always had an emotional component.

Those who speak of political emotion as something new and negative, as a degradation of the relationship between citizens and representatives, forget that emotion and feelings have always been part of language and political relationships.

It is not new that electoral campaigns resort to ingredients of an emotional nature.

Perhaps the difference is that now these elements are the center of the campaign, while before they were just the cover for what had been the core of the debate until then: interests.

It shouldn't surprise us.

It occurs in many other areas of life, as the affiliation of citizens to social groups has been fading and the articulation of shared interests, mainly linked to the world of the economy, has become more difficult.

Thus, today the material with which politics is made are mainly feelings, which is exactly the material that nourishes advertising.

This emotional policy revolves around three basic feelings: tiredness, fear and anger.

Currently, political action consists of trying to generate these three emotions in the social body, with the aim that they function as fuel for the mobilization or demobilization of the electorate.

If we analyze with a certain distance and detachment any electoral campaign, even any communication campaign,

Tiredness is a feeling that leads directly to abstention.

The voter who feels tired, bored, even fed up, tends to leave the field of play, annoyed with the contenders, mainly with their own.

Generating fatigue among the electorate is key to promoting demobilization, distancing from politics, something that can be very beneficial, especially if that demobilization weakens the adversary.

Fatigue is not evenly distributed among citizens.

It mainly affects the left and young people, who are more likely to feel that politics does not take them into account or that political debates take paths that this voter does not approve of.

Voters on the left tend to reach those limits more easily than those on the right.

Hence, they have a greater tendency to fatigue,

Fear is usually the key that is pressed every time you want to avoid the fatigue of your own electorate.

It is increasingly common to use fear to mobilize a more lazy electorate, especially on the left.

Fear of the extreme right, fear of leaving Europe, fear of the unknown.

The polls show us how the vote against is increasingly present, the vote that seeks not so much to elect a party but to prevent another from accessing the government.

For this, obviously, it is necessary that there is a rival with enough thickness to generate that fear.

In the French campaign, Marine Le Pen focused a good part of her efforts on not creating fear, on denying that her accession to the presidency could instill fear.

In Spain there have been elections that have been won by appealing to fear.

In 1993,

the narrow victory of the Socialists was largely based on the fear that a possible arrival of the PP to the government instilled.

In 2017 the victory of Cs in the autonomous elections of Catalonia was based on the fear of a very important part of the Catalan electorate that a triumph of the independentistas would lead to making secession effective.

Whenever there is fear, there is a notable increase in participation.

Generating fear yields electorally.

Third, rage is a magnificent agent not only of mobilization, but of action.

The voter who feels anger becomes a publicist, an activist for your cause.

Rage is a higher stage than fear.

Sometimes it is based on fear, but it goes much further.

Anger does not make the voter react to a possible scenario, activating it to prevent that hypothetical future from becoming a reality.

Rage serves to modify the present, it pushes the voter.

To put it in some way, fear makes the voter stand up, stand up;

rage makes him advance against what he hates and despises.

The most recent case is that of the regional elections in Madrid in the spring of 2021. The PP was able to make Pedro Sánchez a villain from a movie, who had to be defeated by going out to vote en masse, as happened.

Politics has gone from being primarily an activity based on managing interests to one based on managing emotions.

All political action is aimed at generating fatigue, fear or anger in the electorate, in different proportions and in different segments.

In Spain, the right can only win if it is capable of maintaining the rage of its own while at the same time inducing some of its opponents to become tired.

The chances of the left, for its part, depend on the fear that the possibility of a right-wing victory can instil in its ranks.

Since his election as president of the PP, Feijóo has played mainly to numb the electorate of the left, not to be afraid, like Aznar in 1996. Sánchez, for his part, does not stop mentioning Vox whenever he can .

Managing feelings, that is politics today.

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Source: elparis

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