Europe’s new MEPs are more concerned with keeping tabs on top European Commission officials on Twitter than with their fellow legislators or national politicians, according to an analysis carried out exclusively for POLITICO.
The top 20 list of politicians followed by the MEPs who took their seats in Strasbourg this week is dominated by nine commissioners or senior officials from the EU’s executive arm. Outgoing Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker tops the table — he is followed by 288 of the 629 MEPs who have a Twitter account.
The Commission’s institutional account is the most popular of all Twitter handles, followed by 313 of the new MEPs.
But national politicians and members of the European Council are less popular with legislators. Just two — Council President Donald Tusk with 276 MEP follows, and French President Emmanuel Macron with 166 follows — make the list of top 20 politicians.
The rest of that list is made up of U.S. figures, with former President Barack Obama (264 follows) well ahead of the current occupant of the White House, Donald Trump (160).
From the most influential journalists to the countries that punch above their weight (and MEPs’ apparent ambivalence to football), here’s POLITICO’s deep-dive into the Twitter feeds of Europe’s new batch of legislators.
Don’t forget to use our interactive tool to find out how many MEPs follow your own Twitter account.
Brussels bubble
The list of international politicians (excluding MEPs) followed by EU parliamentarians is heavily Brussels-dominated. It includes just one European leader (Macron), one national politician (Germany’s Martin Schulz, who is a former European Parliament president) and four U.S. politicians (Trump, Obama, Hilary Clinton and the U.S. president’s institutional account @POTUS).
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, does not have a Twitter account and so does not feature on the list. The analysis was carried out before the nomination of Ursula von der Leyen as Commission president.
Follow my leader
The list of MEPs most followed by their fellow legislators is dominated by the group leaders in the previous Parliament. Liberal group head Guy Verhofstadt tops the table with 206 follows, with European People’s Party chief Manfred Weber in second on 169. President of the last Parliament, Antonio Tajani, is fourth with 113 follows, although his institutional account (@EP_President, which on Wednesday passed into the hands of the new President David Maria Sassoli) does better with 190.
The list also has significant Commission influence with two of the top 10 — Andrus Ansip and Corina Crețu — acting as commissioners in Juncker’s executive team before being elected to the new Parliament.
Cutting the data by country and party highlights some new names who don’t make it on to the top list of MEPs. Nathalie Loiseau, who led the campaign for Macron’s La République En Marche, is the most followed French MEP. Richard Corbett, who leads the U.K. Labour’s group in the Parliament is the most influential British tweeter.
Punching above
Not all countries are equal in the MEP Twitterverse. The list of cumulative Twitter follows of MEPs from the nations that make up the EU is not surprisingly dominated by the larger countries with the most representatives in Parliament. Germany’s MEPs clock a cumulative total of 2,274 follows by other legislators, more than any other country. France’s MEPs are second with 1,597.
But more interesting is to level the playing field by dividing those totals by the number of MEPs on Twitter in each country. That puts Belgian MEPs at the top of the list with 34 follows by fellow members of the assembly on average — helped admittedly by Verhofstadt’s mega-following.
The equivalent analysis for each of the party groupings throws up a divide between parties that are supportive of the EU and those who are critical or outright hostile to the bloc. Parliamentarians from the European People’s Party, Socialists and Democrats, Greens and Renew Europe have an average number of MEP follows ranging tightly from 24.3 to 26.5. There is a big drop to MEPs from the European Conservatives and Reformists, whose members have on average just 14 follows by fellow legislators.
The media
POLITICO Europe (@POLITICOEurope) tops the list of most influential media outlets with 219 follows among MEPs. The account is the seventh most followed account of all.
The media top 20 is dominated by European outlets, with nine of the top 10 based in the Continent — including four in the U.K. (the Guardian, the Economist and two from the BBC). The New York Times is the only U.S. publication to make the top 10. POLITICO’s U.S. twitter account (@politico) is at 19 on the list.
POLITICO’s Ryan Heath (@PoliticoRyan) tops the list of journalists, with 152 follows from MEPs, while Brussels Playbook Editor Florian Eder (@florianeder) is third with 88 follows (other POLITICO journalists’ accounts can be found here). At number 2 is Peter Spiegel, who was the FT’s Brussels bureau chief and is now the paper’s U.S. managing editor.
Football? meh.
MEPs don’t appear to have much interest in the Continent’s football teams, at least judging by their Twitter follows. The most followed club is Barcelona with eight follows, with Bayern Munich and Real Madrid second, on six follows each. Arsenal is the most popular English club with just three MEP follows.
News you can use
Rather than just present our analysis, we have embedded a search tool below that will let you input any Twitter handle. It displays the party breakdown of MEPs that follow that account. Don’t worry, no one will know if you search for yourself — unless you post the result on Twitter with hashtag #MEPtwitterbubble.
This is optimized for display on desktop.
The methodology bit — how we did it
To build the dataset, we downloaded data on the followers of every MEP we could find who is active on Twitter (629 in total). The data is a snapshot and is not updated in real time so if an MEP has followed or unfollowed someone since we collected the data in late June then that will not be reflected in the results. Frans Timmermans, of the Socialists and Democrats, and Valdis Dombrovskis from the European People’s Party both pulled out of the assembly after we carried out our analysis so we excluded them from our list of top-followed MEPs.
To build the search tool and keep our database at a manageable size, we culled any Twitter accounts from our database that are only followed by one MEP, so all of the accounts listed are followed by at least two MEPs.
Any data inputted into the search tool is used only to scour the database and provide results, it is not stored.
If you liked this analysis of the Brussels Twitter network, check out our previous analysis of who U.K. parliamentarians in Westminster follow.
James O’Malley tweets as @Psythor, and is currently followed by five British MPs but no MEPs of any nationality.