As we all know now, yesterday Antonio Tajani was elected the new president of the European Parliament with 351 out of 713 votes. The S&D’s Pittella put up a fight till the 4th round, but his 282 votes did not cut it. 80 MEPs abstained from the vote.
What happened offline also happened online: a balanced debate with no significant peaks. Twitter results, however, gave only a very slight edge to Tajani over Pittella.
The hashtag #Tajani was used by MEPs 92 times, only 15 times more than the competitor’s #gianni4president.
The most used one was #EPPresident more than 400 times – incidentally, the ‘E’ and the double ‘PP’ unintentional wordplay seemed almost a premonition of the final result :).
The most mentioned Twitter handle was of course @Antonio_Tajani , with more than 400 mentions.
The most active MEP overall was without any doubt Alessandra Mussolini, fellow EPP member of Tajani, with almost 200 tweets and retweets posted in a day. The award for the most active original content tweeter, however, goes to Roger Helmer, who posted more than 40 times about… Brexit.
The most reshared tweets were posted by Mr Verhofstadt (ALDE leader) and Mr Weber (EPP leader) when they announced the new ALDE/EPP parliament coalition.