The European Greens have been hiring Instagram influencers—from travel vloggers to professional pro-choice activists—to promote their campaign messaging ahead of the elections..
Social media was established as the primary playground of the Greens back in 2019, when the group by far spent the most on online advertising—€409 million, ahead of the European People’s Party’s €67 million and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D)’s €35 million ad budget.
This makes sense as the party usually wins over the youngest demographic of voters, many of whom were mobilized by Greta Thunberg’s Friday protests five years ago, letting the Greens ride a wave of planet-saving enthusiasm with a truckload of well-placed social media ads.
According to a report in Politico’s most recent EU influence newsletter, the Greens are looking to repeat their 2019 success (at least among the youth, as polls show the group will lose the most seats after June 9th), but need a new strategy due to platforms deprioritizing political content—as well as how “wildly” more expensive social media advertising has become in recent years.
As Sybren Kooistra, the European Greens’ campaign manager explained, the party now relies on “a few thousand volunteers” and “dozens and dozens of [paid] influencers” to spread their campaign massaging on Instagram and other platforms popular among the European youth, which is deemed especially important in countries where people as young as 16 can vote in EU elections.
These influencers are primarily picked for having large follower counts—hundreds of thousands, typically. Kooistra added that the party also makes sure that their politics and ideology are more or less aligned with the Greens’.
According to the report, the Greens’ paid influencers, include a wide range of content creators, from a popular sustainable travel vlogger in Spain with over 420,000 followers to a Croatian pro-abortion activist named Grof Darkula whose campaign video compares the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders to Hitler, Italian PM Giorgia Meloni to Mussolini, France’s Marine Le Pen to Putin, and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary to the Nazi regime.
Interestingly, the fact that it was paid for by the European Green Party is only mentioned in the description, while the video says it was created “with financial support of the European Parliament”—possible because EU election campaign costs can be reimbursed from the common budget paid for by the taxpayers.
