Comunicação eleitoral e institucionalização política: estratégias midiáticas de lideranças de trajetória outsider

Abstract

This thesis investigates the electoral communication strategies employed by political leaders who entered the political arena with a public image as "outsiders" but subsequently assumed more institutionalized positions within the party-political system. The analysis focuses on the 2022 gubernatorial election in Minas Gerais and the 2024 mayoral election in Belo Horizonte, treating these two contests as complementary moments for understanding the evolution of these leaders' communication strategies and public image construction. The study is grounded in the premise that the electoral rise of candidates identified as outsiders is not a static state but a process characterized by shifts in discourse, political orientation, and communication style. It engages with literature from the fields of political communication, electoral communication, and political science—specifically discussions regarding mediatization, political representation, anti-politics, digital populism, outsiders, insiders, and the Brazilian party system. Methodologically, the thesis combines bibliographic research, document analysis, content analysis, and film analysis. The corpus consists of 682 audiovisual posts published on the official Facebook pages of the campaigns of Romeu Zema (Novo), Alexandre Kalil (then with the PSD), and Carlos Viana (then with the PL) during the 2022 state elections, and those of Fuad Noman (PSD), Bruno Engler (PL), Mauro Tramonte (Republicanos), and Carlos Viana (Podemos) during the 2024 municipal race in Belo Horizonte. Among the findings and conclusions is the observation that, while anti-political rhetoric remains present at various stages of the campaigns, it increasingly shares space with narratives emphasizing administrative experience, management capability, governability, and the building of political alliances. At the same time, it is observed that social media platforms are moving beyond their role as mere promotional spaces to structure a significant part of electoral strategies, incorporating the language of the digital environment and reimagining formats traditionally associated with television. The research also proposes a categorization to understand different levels of political institutionalization, contributing to the debate on the trajectories of leaders who transition from outsider status to integration into the political establishment, as well as to studies focused on audiovisual election campaigns in the context of Minas Gerais.