This Twitter study focuses on the recent war of words between Renzi and Jean-Claude Juncker, triggered by the latter’s critical remarks towards Italy during the Commission’s 2016 new year’s press conference. The Renzi-Juncker quarrel is the latest, and certainly one of the most visible episodes of a new political fault line between claims of national sovereignty and the influence of supranational institutions.
We collected all tweets mentioning both Renzi and Juncker, on January 15 (the day of Juncker’s press conference) and for the following five days. Over the monitored period, 8,724 such tweets were written across languages. In the subset of tweets in Italian, we have separated those expressing criticism of Renzi from the neutral or positive ones. Overall, 4,759 (60.7 per cent) tweets belong to the former camp, while 3,080 (39.3 per cent) are in the latter. The following interactive dashboard details these results.
Photo credits: Città di Parma
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