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The Populist 2017 Electoral Campaign and Cultural Policy: A Case Study of the Return of ‘Outcast’ Željko Kerum onto the Croatian Political Scene

The chapter presents a case study analysis of a populist political campaign during the 2017 local elections in Croatia. Its focus is on populist style and substance in the political communication of Željko Kerum, a candidate for mayor of Croatia’s second-largest city, Split. The authors provide a theoretical overview of the phenomenon of populism, its relationship with the processes of electoral campaign communications, its cultural dimensions, and its connections with cultural policy. The chapter’s core is the case study of the local populist leader Željko Kerum and his unexpected return from the status of a political ‘outcast’ to the limelight of the local political scene. Content analysis of Kerum’s campaign communications on social media – and elements of populist style in a broader media context – are presented, together with a contextualisation of the case study in the social, political, and cultural milieu. The chapter concludes that, during the campaign, Kerum was building the image of a ‘true man of the people’, of a person who shares – and even embodies – the values and tastes of the ‘people’, constructed as a homogenous group, and was striving to identify himself as representing the city and its (popular) ‘culture’. Along with more typical elements of populist style in media communications, analysis of the revealing ‘Kerum case’ offers an elaboration of an instance of meme-styled, social network–based, unofficial campaign promotion (a populist social media perspective on the idea that ‘negative publicity is still publicity’) and an analysis of Kerum’s relationship towards cultural policy in which he took sides, in the specific case of a mini ‘culture war’, using a populist, conservative, anti-elite, anti-high-culture stance.

Populism ; Cultural Policy ; Political Communication ; Social Media ; Željko Kerum

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