What Do the 2025 Local Elections Candidates Talk About? #4

WEEKLY OVERVIEW #4 (6TH – 12TH OCTOBER 2025)

The analysis of the media and social networks posts for the last week confirms that the campaign intensifies, and the focus is more and more on specific local solutions that directly impact the everyday lives of the citizens. The discussions are intensive on social networks, where the specific promises related to transport, education and local infrastructure continue to dominate.

Apart from these topics, the ones on kindergartens and digitalization of services were also part of the discourse. In several municipalities there is also an increase of topics related to transparency and digitalization of municipal services – introduction of e-services, on-line budgets and public data bases of tenders. Although these topics are still not so frequent in the campaign, it is them that relate the interest of the citizens with the issues of accountability and integrity, which are crucial for the civil sector.

Local issues and services. This topic covers the everyday problems that the citizens face, such as cleaning of streets, maintenance of parks and greenery, as well as resolving the problem with the illegal landfills. The citizens obviously appreciate the most being able to directly see the result of the investments in their settlements.

Education and schools. In this area, there are distinct promises for modernization of school infrastructure, improvement of the conditions in classrooms and providing better conditions for play and recreation. The initiatives for construction of new playgrounds in school yards or teaching equipment regularly receive high support by the parents and local communities.

City transport and infrastructure. This topic includes promised for public transport improvements, expanding the cycling trail networks and fixing of local roads. The specific initiatives such as asphalting of the streets and similar ones, have a direct impact on the everyday lives of the citizens and therefore receive lively reactions.

What really moves the citizens?

The data indicate 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. As opposed to this, the abstract promises without any visual support or local context have less interest.

What happens with the civil society topics?

This week the topics of transparency, accountability and financing of the civil society have also not been among the priorities of the candidates that are more visible in the media posts. There are sporadic mentions of digitalization, but they are part of the rhetoric for “faster administration” and “electronic services” – and not as tools for public control, budget publishing or monitoring of tenders.

Several candidates mention “fight against corruption” or “accountability to citizens”, but they rarely offer specific instruments – publishing of contracts, registers for conflict of interest, public sessions of the municipal councils, etc.

This gap remains crucial for the CSOs: the topics have to be actively included in the public debate, best by connecting them to local services, environmental services or specific cases of inefficiency. Without this, they are at risk of remaining invisible throughout the campaign.

Where does the discussion happen?

The dynamics of the platforms continues to show a clear mismatch between the activities of the candidates and the response of the public. This week too TikTok is the most effective platform – with an average of 551 interactions per post, four times more than Instagram (~123) and Facebook (~107).

Telegram has remained the most active platform per number of posts (~23 per politician), but with almost zero reactions – which means that the politicians overinvest in a channel that does not create a real engagement with the audience. As opposed to it, Facebook is the platform with broad coverage, while Instagram functions as a bridge for visual storytelling.

Hate speech has remained under 10% of the total comments with the candidates that are most visible in the media. The smaller municipalities show bigger proportional toxicity – for example, in Gjorche Petrov the rate is up to 9%, although in absolute numbers it is small volume. The biggest absolute exposure is with the most visible candidates, but the highest rates per post are noted with candidates with smaller, but more polarized audiences.

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.