What Do the 2025 Local Elections Candidates Talk About? #3

Weekly Overview #3 19th [September – 5th October 2025]

The public discourse analysis of the last week reveals that the campaign is fully focused on the everyday issues that directly impact the lives of the citizens. Most of the discussions take place on social networks, where the specific promises for improvement of local conditions dominate.

During the week, three thematic areas obviously shape the communication strategies. Local issues take the central position, with a special stress on waste management, settlement maintenance and improvement of communal services. Education is the stable second topic, with frequent references to the state of affairs in the schools and kindergartens. City transport is being stressed as a key priority, especially in the bigger urban centres, where the promises for better transport connections and infrastructure generate significant publicity.

Local issues and services. This topic covers the everyday problems that citizens face, such as cleaning of the streets, maintenance of parks and greeneries, as well as resolving the issue with illegal landfills. For example, specific promises for rehabilitation of children’s playgrounds or installation of new waste bins have caused many positive reactions at the social networks. The citizens obviously appreciate it the most when they can directly see the result of the investments in their settlement.

Education and schools. In this area, there are prominent promises for modernization of school infrastructure, improvement of conditions in classrooms and providing better conditions for play and recreation. A specific example of big media coverage is the promise to build new modern playgrounds in school yards and provision of the necessary equipment for quality teaching. These initiatives regularly obtain high support from the local communities.

City transport and infrastructure. This topic includes promises for improvement of public transport, expanding the cycling trails network and fixing the local roads. One of the most commented proposals was the one for introduction of new bus lines that would connect the peripheral settlements with the centre of the city, as well as fixing the damaged asphalt on the main streets. These initiatives directly impact the everyday lives of the citizens and therefore cause lively reactions.

What really moves the citizens?

Data show that there are significant differences in how various thematic approaches engage the citizens. The candidates whose messages focus on direct, visible improvements with clear timeframes consistently attract higher level of interaction. This trend is especially visible with the candidates that communicate via short visual contents at platforms such as TikTok, where the effect of specific promises is most visible.

What happens with the civil society topics?

Despite the broadness of the topics that are discussed, two areas remain substantially neglected. Financing of civil sector and issues of transparency continue to be rare in the public discourse, which implies a continued need for bringing them in the local development discussions.

Where does the discussion happen?

The dynamics of the platforms continues to show a clear mismatch between the activities of the candidates and the public response. Although some platform are more popular with the candidates when it comes to posting, it is the short visual contents that again prove to be the most effective when it comes to audience engagement, with an average of four times bigger engagement per post compared to the traditional platforms.

The graphs below show the key topics per media and social network posts. Please take into consideration that during the processing for the purpose of this presentation all posts per topic have been covered, rather than only the ones that have been communicated by the participants in the local elections and for the needs of the election campaign.

Methodology

The data in this overview come from a comprehensive monitoring of the public discourse conducted via Pikasa Analytics platform, which combines automatized monitoring with an advanced analysis of the contents from the on-line media and social networks.

Civica Mobilitas is a project of the Swiss Government implemented by MCIC., NIRAS from Denmark and FCG from Sweden. The opinions and views expressed in this article do not reflect the views of the Swiss Government.