1. Spain: Internet Campaign in General Elections
In the past months, Spanish Internet has suffered a political invasion, in what could be
called a “Digital Revolution”. During the May 2007 local election campaign, several
candidates tested original formats, such as the Partido Popular webpage where they
showed their program: the visitor wrote their gender and age, and a moment later
received a summary of the most relevant measures that the program offered them.
After the storm of the election, the calm returned to the internet, with the politicians
retreating to their offices. The best example of this is shown by the fact that only three
main Presidential candidates keep a personal blog: Rosa Díez, head of UPyD (a party
that pulled out of the PSOE due to the Basque discussion), Duran y Lleida, CiU
candidate (moderate Catalan nationalists), and Communist leader Gaspar Llamazares.
The truth is that the mainstream political forces look scared of the web. Spanish
politicians still ignore the internet’s world and it’s inhabitants: they only stop by at
election time, as if obliged to do so: through the web, they seek an impact in
traditional media rather than a massive mobilization.
But all gloves are off as the March 9th general elections approach. No one forgets the
lessons of 2004, when thousands of people, summoned through SMS, gathered before
the headquarters of the then governing Partido Popular at the time. Most analyzers
see digital operators as a destabilizing tool next March 9, and no one wants to be left
behind. In January 21, of all leading candidates, only 15% kept a blog. A month later
it almost doubled: 27,5%.
The PSOE, the Socialist Party, ruling since the last elections, has unified its new
campaign around the slogan “a positive viewpoint”: they have built a very clear page
with daily news updates and downloads, but it only incorporates some social
networks, and links to some sites, as the Party’s, conzdezapatero.com (Z like
Zapatero), or psoetv.es.
The Partido Popular, on the other hand, has built a “high tech, high touch” web page
around its leader Mariano Rajoy. Designed with a very attractive, innovative and clean
web, it transmits the feeling of a closer, in‐touch leader. There are many different
sections where the party expresses its ideas: a part for the press and a TV channel,
Rajoy TV, links to the Party’s web and to social networks. The problem is that the
homepage is a massive link collection: nobody can directly see the recent information
in the homepage or the tools to get involved.
Gaspar Llamazares, Communist IU leader, has changed his previous website of dubious
quality one week ago: the new site has an elegant look and feeling, and an innovative
flash animation with different chapters and a very simple storyline.
In the social networks battlefield, the Popular Party is winning the war, especially in
Facebook. Rajoy has already more than 5.000 “cyber friends”, and more than 800
comments: some criticize him, others suggest policies (as eliminating the tariff
imposed on anyone who buys a digital product as compensation for violations of
copyrighted material), but the grand majority support him. Mariano even sends you a

2. greeting card if it is your birthday. Zapatero, on the other side, is under a false profile,
and only has 5 o 6 different support groups, the largest having 1.800 members and
around 300 comments.
Other social movements are working hard on the Internet. On all sides, with different
ideologies, movements like yorompo.org (literally “I break”, implying with Zapatero),
adioz.es (playing with the initial of the President’s name and goodbye in Spanish),
iloveiu.org (playing with the initials of the Communist party), or
plataformaapoyozapatero.es (PAZ, group of artists supporting Zapatero, strongly
influenced by the Barack Obama “Yes we can” campaign), have a new importance in
the political life in the web. Some of them have begun to collect money, a very unusual
occurrence in Spain: “yorompo” gained up to 35.000€ for its campaign against
Zapatero and “adioZ” sells T‐shirts, umbrellas, etc. There are also more discreet
projects, as loprometidoesdeuda.com, which stores the campaign promises, in order
to remind the visitors of the promises, and to remind the promise makers of their
responsibilities. Outside our borders some sites mobilize the emigrant Spaniards to
vote, like cheyole.com.
The mass media has begun to use Internet in the elections too: some Spanish TV
channels have imported the CNN & YouTube idea to get questions from the man in the
street for their interviews during the campaign. But the most innovative projects in
Internet are videos. YouTube has opened special channels for the campaign, where all
the political parties have posted their videos. As of today, 13 days before Election Day,
the PP Channel has 256 videos, 1.508 Subscribers and 183.942 Channel Views. PSOE
has 195 videos, 1.539 Subscribers and 141,335 Channel Views. IU has only 16 videos,
350 subscribers and 41.150 views.
PSOE´s “No seas él” video parodied Rajoy’s behavior of a “cenizo” (grouchy person
who transmits his pessimistic ideas). The video got more than 400.000 visits in its first
day. Rajoy has used videos in a particular way too. The PP organized a contest, asking
for 30 second videos, similar to the initiative “Bushin59seconds”, which would
eventually become an electoral spot. In another interactive web video, which asked
previously for the viewers cell number, Rajoy appears with his closest collaborators,
and calls the viewer on their cell phone asking for their help. The idea had a big impact
in the media, but presented problems as well: notably, some people received
unsolicited calls from Mariano Rajoy. (It isn’t easy to control that the viewer puts their
own phone number in the webpage!) Presently, Mariano sends you an email.
Up till now, young people have made the most aggressive, and perhaps the funniest,
videos: most of them are the result of less than politically correct ideas. The majority
of videos tend to bitterly criticize the other side, making fun of mistakes the contrary
committed. In this sense, both “el preguntón” and “el respondón” explain with
sarcasm and different points of view the difference between right and left wing
youths.

3. Internet has become the way to transform sympathizers into activists, in order to
propagate political ideas throughout the web. However the biggest mistake of all
these political online strategies is the actual form of contact with these surfers. PSOE
opened its political program to people’s suggestions, but have some problems erasing
them. (Some surfers like to make waves…) Additionally, PSOE designed a strategy for
cyber volunteers to promote socialist values in blogs, chats, forums or sending mails to
known contacts; yet a month later, the first 50.000 volunteers are the only ones,
something very unusual. The reason: they feel underused, since the party has limited
their action to sending two o three emails asking for votes in some polls’ pages.
Zapatero, in its web, opened a section for the suggestions of citizens, and it seems
anyone who sent a comment was against the tariff on digital products: the people
responsible of the web’s maintenance have struggled to explain their position on the
matter (3.230 characters were used to explain the high priority state housing policy,
compared to 5.159 for the “canon”), yet no one was convinced. Finally, the web
closed.
IU organized a contest to choose the campaign melody, as Hillary Clinton did, but it did
not respond to people who asked for information. Llamazares, in an attempt to
revolutionize the web, made it a point of honour to answering personally via prepared
videos any question surfers had. Yet the answers are limited to general matters, and
when asked about witty but unexpected things, he tends to stick to his general
electoral program information as a response.
Political groups do not believe in the electoral strength of the Internet and continue to
approach the matter with diffidence. Like David de Ugarte says, “parties continue to
lack a special internet response, and tend to see it as just another channel. The
problem is that they want to send a message to people, instead of letting the people
send the message to them”. Only humble parties, without sufficient resources for
traditional mass media campaigning, bet big on the web.
The objective is to get rid of the old idea of the Internet as a one way communication
tool, to modulate the candidate and the party’s image, and transform it into
something new… Politics 2.0, anyone?
2008
Rafa Rubio