How many Heads of Government are known to be bloggers? Hungarian Premier Ferenc Gyurcsany may be the first one. The country is preparing for parliamentary elections this Sunday, and the incumbent’s move to start his blog several months ago turns out to be smart in many ways.
It’s all about getting close, personal: the occasional TV-interview at their private home, with kids running around always boosts politician’s ratings, but how often can they do it? Gyurcsany talks to tens (hundreds?) of thousands of users every day on his personal blog. His readers now know his family, they know about his son’s football accident, about his dog breaking expensive china ..etc – considering that polls show this election to be extremely tight, for the undecided voter it may just come down to this level of “personalization”.
Starting the blog was a perfect coup, putting his opponent in a rather inconvenient situation: if he starts his own blog, he’s a copycat, if he doesn’t (which is what he chose), he clearly sends at least tens of thousands of undecided voters to the incumbent’s way.
Tomorrow we’ll see how it worked. I certainly hope the blog will not die after the elections, independent of the results – in fact I hope this will set a precedent for other Heads of Government.
Update (4/13): The Premier’s party won the first rounds in the elections.
Update (9/20): German Chancellor Angela Merkel started videoblogging. Btw, the Blogma post incorrectly identifies Merkel Head of State. Germany has a (largely ceremonial) Head of State, the Chancellor runs the Government.
I’m Topping Yahoo News (?)
No way .. that can’t be – that’s what I thought when my visitor log showed Yahoo News as referrer. Clicking the link explains it all: Yahoo News Search also displays relevant blog posts in the sidebar. I wrote a piece abou…
Zoli,
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Itt 🙂