NEWS FOCUS. 30 days for Bucharest – the month that decided the mayor of the Capital. Impact online

According to the data extracted and analyzed with the help of NewsVibe, an AI platform for real-time media monitoring, Ciprian Ciucu, the candidate supported by PNL, won the online visibility race of the main competitors for the Capital City Hall in the last month before the elections. He surpassed the social-democrat Daniel Băluță by over 1,700 mentions in the most relevant online sources (web, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok). In the top 3 of visibility is also Cătălin Drulă, with over 5,100 mentions. The candidate supported by AUR, Anca Alexandrescu, ranks 4th in the online media coverage ranking, with nearly 4,400 mentions.

The hierarchy of online visibility partially overlaps with the final election results, the data suggesting that, although high online exposure is an indicator of relevance and the intensity of public debate, it is not sufficient to explain electoral behavior on its own. In the case of Anca Alexandrescu, a lower volume of mentions compared to her opponents was compensated by a more effective mobilization of her own electorate, while for Daniel Băluță and Cătălin Drulă, higher visibility did not proportionally translate into votes.

CAMPAIGN PACE: VOLUME AND IMPACT. As expected, election day generated the most mentions and the highest impact – as a result of intensified media coverage of the electoral moment in the online space. The first week of the official campaign for the Bucharest elections (November 21-27) was characterized by a rather low pace of online conversation, with the volume of discourse about the campaign increasing significantly in the second week and culminating on voting day, which produced an explosion both in the number of mentions about the elections and in their estimated impact in the online space.

NewsVibe Chart. Evolution of the number of mentions (blue) about the elections for the position of Mayor of the Capital, respectively the impact of these mentions (green), in the last month 

KEY ACTORS IN THE BUCHAREST CAMPAIGN. Naturally, the terms most frequently associated with the elections in articles from web sources and in posts on social networks are City Hall of the Capital, Bucharest, and the names of the main candidates — Ciprian Ciucu, Anca Alexandrescu, Daniel Băluță, and Cătălin Drulă — as well as the parties that supported them: PNL, USR, PSD, and AUR.

However, the presence of the name Nicușor Dan is also notable, indicating that the president was perceived, in the online conversation about the elections, as a key personality associated with the electoral process. His association with the Bucharest elections is significantly more pronounced than that of the president of PNL.

Moreover, it is noteworthy that, among the entities most frequently associated with the elections, the names of the presidents of PSD and USR are missing, reflecting a different level of visible involvement of these parties in the campaign. Secondary visibility was also held by names such as Vlad Gheorghe or Ludovic Orban, who announced their support for Ciprian Ciucu, or the name Ana Ciceală, the latter being perceived during the campaign as one of the actors with the potential to achieve a score above initial expectations.

NewsVibe Chart. Entities most frequently associated in online sources with the elections for the position of Mayor of the Capital, in the last month 

THE SEMANTIC NETWORK OF ONLINE DISCOURSE ABOUT ELECTIONS. The tool created by NewsVibe – semantic network analysis – uses advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning methods to build interaction maps that highlight: the central actors of a conversation, the connections between them, the groups (clusters) of themes, concepts, and influencers (personalities and organizations) that have formed around an event, subject, or idea.

NewsVibe Chart. The semantic network associated with the online conversation about the elections for the position of Mayor of the Capital, in the last month 

What the analysis shows: 

• The only distinct political areas of the online conversation, built around a single party or a single candidate, are those PSD/Daniel Băluță and AUR/Anca Alexandrescu. Both benefit from a clear delineation in the online conversational space.
• Another important area is the institutional one, dominated by terms such as Bucharest and City Hall of the Capital, primarily focused on the electoral process itself and on the administrative themes of the Capital, perceived as structural challenges for local administration, beyond direct political competition.
• One of the most consistent and relevant areas of online debate is simultaneously outlined around USR and PNL, but also around the names Ciprian Ciucu, Cătălin Drulă, and Nicușor Dan. This area reflects both the existence of a distinct pole of the Right and the highly publicized competition between the candidates of USR and PNL for capturing the Bucharest electorate. Recurrently, in association with this competition, the name Nicușor Dan appears, perceived in the online conversation as a supporter of the USR candidate.

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS. The NewsVibe platform has created an advanced automated sentiment analysis system, which uses specially trained AI algorithms and LLM tools to detect tonal nuances – favorable, unfavorable, or neutral – in the context of references to the entities relevant to an online conversation.

NewsVibe Chart. Automated evaluation of the tone of the online conversation about the elections for the position of Mayor of the Capital, in the last month. Sentiment factors (left), respectively sentiment analysis at the level of the entire discussion about the elections (right)

What the analysis shows: 

• The overall tone of the online conversation about the Bucharest elections in the last month was relatively balanced. This balance, however, must be interpreted with an important nuance: an electoral campaign structurally generates a high volume of self-promotional content from candidates, increasingly present in the online space, which significantly contributed to framing them in positive media contexts.
• Among the names associated with the online conversation about the elections, Ciprian Ciucu is the candidate most frequently present in positive contexts. At the same time, his presence in negative contexts remains consistent, reflecting the high exposure and central position occupied in the electoral competition.
• Moreover, the visibility of the main candidates in both types of contexts — positive and negative — has been a constant of this electoral campaign. Intense self-promotion was accompanied by attacks, criticisms, and mutual accusations, the dynamics being specific to a highly publicized and competitive electoral process.

*****Summary created with the help of a data stream provided by the media monitoring platform NewsVibe Romania. The analysis, data, and images presented have been enhanced with the help of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence tools.