By Nikola Spasov
I see that many people still do not understand that campaigning against a politician solely on the basis of hypocrisy, lies and double standards no longer works the way it used to. Or, more precisely, it does not work automatically simply because someone lies or applies double standards.
The European left, the centre and even the traditional right have all thrown themselves into such a campaign against Alice Weidel. She is gay, lives in Switzerland and has a family, yet promises things that are entirely at odds with her own life. All of this is supposed to expose some kind of hypocrisy and make voters say: “Wait, this doesn’t make sense.”
The problem is that voters are not asking that question at all.
In recent years, there has been a profound, almost tectonic shift in the way political communication works.
Not because people have suddenly stopped thinking rationally — politics has never been an especially rational discipline — but because the information environment we live in today rewards our emotions far more than our rationality.
Until recently, proof that a politician had lied, held double standards or lived a private life completely at odds with the politics they preached could have a devastating effect on their approval ratings. “We caught a politician lying” could serve as the foundation for an entire campaign.
That can still work today, but there is one major difference. Hypocrisy ceases to be automatically disqualifying the moment voters believe that the same politician is protecting them from something they perceive as a much greater threat.
What is the reality?
We live in a period of enormous economic and geopolitical uncertainty, wars, migration, rapid technological change and an incredible information overload. Every day, the average person is exposed to a volume of negative information that would have been unimaginable just two decades ago.
War. Murders. Terrorist attack. Migrants. Inflation. Artificial intelligence is going to take your job. Russia is going to attack Europe. Europe is collapsing. America is collapsing. Climate catastrophe. A new pandemic. Scroll for another five minutes and there is yet another end of the world.
This information environment constantly stimulates two of the most powerful political emotions: fear and anger.
And when those two emotions become dominant, the hierarchy of what matters to voters changes as well. That is precisely why attacking Weidel through her private life is so weak in terms of political communication.
I am almost certain that the reasoning of German voters is brutally simple:
Yes, Alice Weidel is gay. Yes, she lives in Switzerland. Yes, there may be contradictions between her private life and some of her party’s policies. So what?
Will she reduce migration? Will I feel safer walking home at night? Will my neighbourhood look the way it used to again? Will I feel that someone is back in control?
If voters believe the answer to those questions is “yes”, the story about hypocrisy ends there.
Weidel’s political opponents are talking about consistency, while voters are thinking about threat and danger. These are two entirely different psychological frames.
And this brings us to the broader problem of the rise of the radical right in Europe. There are, of course, genuine political reasons for its growth: failed policies, problems with migration and integration, economic dissatisfaction, declining trust in institutions, and the inability of parts of the traditional left and right to understand what actually worries people.
But there is also an enormous communications advantage. The messages of the radical right are almost perfectly adapted to the algorithmic age.
A migrant attacks someone. A girl is attacked and raped on the metro. A crowd fights in the street. All you need is a 15-second video, an image, a story or a short message with a few exclamation marks.
You need neither context nor evidence, nor an expert to explain it to you. Most importantly, you do not need more than ten seconds of anyone’s attention.
You need an image and an emotion.
Worse still, with artificial intelligence today, you do not even need a real event. You can generate a fake video of a migrant stabbing someone. By the time anyone checks whether the video is authentic, millions of people have already seen it.
The evidence may arrive a few days later, but fear has already done its job. That is the structural communications advantage.
One side has to explain migration policy, integration, crime statistics, economic effects, international law and demographics. The other side shows a video.
That is why I do not think people have suddenly become more stupid or irrational. We have simply built an information system that rewards our irrationality far more effectively.
How we get out of that is another subject altogether.
Nikola Spasov is a communications strategist, researcher and political consultant.
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