“Happy Monday Friends! Coffee?” Matteo Salvini, Good Morning Selfies, and the Influencer Politician

Politicians regularly fashion their public persona after mass media celebrities to increase their appeal with the public. This process has been famously summarized by John Street (2004) in the ideal-type of the celebrity politician: a politician that adopts the style of a celebrity to boost their political capital. While this characterization remains a powerful descriptor of how fame and politics intercept, we contend that the advent of social media reshaped the way in which politicians perform their celebrity. In particular, we argue that politicians borrow from the repertoire of internet celebrities such as Instagram influencers. Therefore, we suggest that the ideal-type of the celebrity politician should be updated to account for the ways in which politicians perform celebrity in the digital age. We tentatively name this updated ideal-type “influencer politician.” We substantiate our claim with a case study from Italy that explores the visual communication of Matteo Salvini (leader of the right-wing populist party Lega Nord) on Instagram. In particular, we focus on one of the celebrity practices that Salvini borrows from “everyday influencers”: the good morning selfie. These are presented self-portraits of Salvini himself captioned with a good day wish addressing his community of followers as “friends.” We interpret these posts as iterations of “memetic” self-portraits that private users regularly post to social media. In the first section of our paper, we review the literature on celebrity politics, focusing on its recent transformation due to the popularity of social media platforms. Thereafter, we offer an overview of the literature on influencer culture and the crucial role of an “authentic” self-presentation for their success. We also survey the literature exploring the influencer practices that politicians have been observed to borrow. Finally, we situate this literature in the context of Italy, suggesting its link to well-established modes of communication proper of populist leadership. To make our case, we compare the features of Salvini’s “good morning selfies” from 2020 (94 units) to a sample of “good morning selfies” posted by private users to the hashtag #BuongiornoATutti (“Good Morning Everyone”) (214 units). We base our analysis on four main categories: the protagonist of the representation, the setting, other objects in the composition, gaze, and modality. Our findings show that Salvini’s selfies resemble those of private users, but also depart from them in some crucial ways. The two sets of selfies include the same compositional elements, but adopt different modalities. While the selfies of private users are edited to transcend the “everyday” context in which they are taken in order to increase their salience for publication, Salvini’s selfies are deliberately unedited to make the extra-ordinary life of a high-visibility politician come across as “everyday” and relatable. We conclude that the good morning selfie is a micro-celebrity practice that Salvini borrows from social media influencers to groom a feeling of interconnectedness and intimacy with his audience, thus styling himself as one of the people. In our final remarks we offer a tentative definition of the “influencer politician” and invite follow-up research to further corroborate it.