Abstract

This paper examines the political communication employed by Unione Popolare (UP), an alliance of radical left parties led by former mayor of Naples, Luigi de Magistris, for the 2022 Italian parliamentary elections, which ultimately fell short of achieving both parliamentary representation and its estimated voting intention. The study investigates UP’s national communication team formation, budget constraints, intra-alliance communication challenges, and discursive positioning. Additionally, the study assesses UP’s use of digital technologies in relation to the academic discussion on digital parties, examining why its digital dynamism did not match the successes of other European left-wing formations. The analysis also explores UP’s relationship with communicative innovations associated with European left-wing populism, and discusses why these strategies failed to develop within UP. This research offers insights into the complexities of contemporary radical left communication and contributes to filling a significant gap in academic literature concerning the communication strategies of classical radical left actors like UP