Portuguese political leaders on Twitter/X during the 2024 electoral campaign: An exploratory study

Portugal recently had legislative elections in which there was a very significant growth of the populist far right, like what has been happening in other European countries. There are abundant examples in the literature of the influence of social media and, particularly, Twitter/X in this effect, but this has not yet been studied in the Portuguese case. In this context, this article addresses the use of Twitter/X by the leaders of Portuguese parties and coalitions having parliamentary representation just before the 2024 elections. An exploratory quantitative methods approach was used. Metadata relating to all tweets made by the Portuguese political leaders in their personal Twitter/X profiles during the election campaign was specifically collected for this purpose (1,115 tweets posted between January 15 and March 10, 2024). The subjects of all the tweets were determined based on 6,072 observations made by 11 volunteers (5.45 observations per tweet, in average). Main findings contribute to validate previous knowledge that Twitter/X works as a sounding board of the typical discourses of political leaders; that more populist and radical leaders have most followers; that the subjects addressed by these leaders may be different on the right and left political wings; and that more populist discourses are the most impacting ones. The most innovative finding is that, despite all this, the leaders of the Portuguese non-populist right have a greater impact than the leader of the populist far right, when this impact is relativized by the number of followers. In general, leaders from the right-wing have greater relativized impacts than from the left wing. The article presents a methodological innovation related precisely to the measurement of this relativized impact.