TikTok, the clock ticks for the center

Always the innovators, in 2023 we Greeks elected a complete unknown as leader of the country’s main opposition party. Of course, Donald Trump had already shown how someone not in politics could rush in and overturn the “system.” Before him, Silvio Berlusconi had done this in Italy. Berlusconi and Trump, though, were already well known, with a ubiquitous presence in public life before they expanded their commercial activities into politics.

Stefanos Kasselakis came from nowhere, hitting a dazed SYRIZA like lightning after a crushing national election. And the party, well trained in wishful thinking, thought that this photogenic young man they saw on social media would lead it forward. Then, in Cyprus, we saw the phenomenon Fidias, another political “unknown” who leveraged his very well-known social media persona into winning a seat in the European Parliament, at the expense of established parties.

On Sunday, we saw a political earthquake in Romania, in the first round of the presidential election. There, the independent Calin Georgescu (an ultranationalist friend of Moscow) defied the polls, which forecast him getting around 5%, to win the first round with 22.9%. He is now headed for the runoff on December 8. A large part of Georgescu’s unexpected success is put down to his viral campaign on TikTok.

This “explanation” for electoral surprises is no longer a surprise. Berlusconi had at his disposal popular mass media which he owned, before the spread of social media. Now, without owning anything, others can have the same influence. Trump had – and always has – all America’s attention with his verbal (and other) outrages, in both traditional and new media. And he has proved a master at exploiting all new media – from using existing social media to establishing his own, to interviews with various podcasters whose “home-made” shows have a huge listenership and great impact, especially on young men. It was mainly these podcasters, outsiders of the official information and entertainment ecosystem, who spread and maintained the great lie of the “stolen election” in 2020. They moved many to support Trump, among them members of groups which traditionally voted for the Democratic Party (such as Latinos, where 48 percent of men aged under 40 voted for Trump in 2024).

The influence of new media is now a given. The clash between SYRIZA and Kasselakis’ new political vehicle, like the relationship between SYRIZA’s new leader Sokratis Famellos and his social media-savvy rival Pavlos Polakis, will show whether “moderate forces” can withstand the explosions that impress an ever more impatient audience.

The new “individualist” media are not dependent on the traditional advertising model, which forces mainstream media to try maintain some balance, so as to win the largest possible audience. On the contrary, whatever is most extreme and unfiltered provides the new media with content and brings them audiences. Sometimes, they are influenced and funded by unknown sources. The center, under attack from all sides, does not have a similar base on which to stand.