There was a time when politicians wanted to be admired. Now, they want to be liked, both literally and metaphorically. Everyone from Rahul Gandhi to Zohran Mamdani is learning the grammar of relatability. The age of the distant leader is over. We are governed, instead, by the illusion of closeness.
The 21st-century politician has discovered the soft power of being relatable. What used to be a world of podiums, manifestos, and press conferences has now blurred into a digital theatrics of personality. The most successful politicians are no longer those who have a strong ideology, but those who can earn attention through the illusion of friendship and camaraderie.
It is not that political image-making is a new thing. Every era has had its own media of persuasion. But social media has done something radical. It has flattened the hierarchy between politician and public. A few decades ago, you waited to hear from your leaders. Today, they appear unprompted on your feed, between memes and cat videos, speaking directly to you.
From Propaganda to Persona
The political class has learned the language of the internet—brevity, irony, and above all, authenticity (or at least its simulation). My favourite example of this is Rahul Gandhi. For decades, he struggled to escape the image of dynastic entitlement. But in the past few years, he has repositioned himself as approachable and empathetic through his social media presence.
His Bharat Jodo Yatra reels contributed heavily in constructing the new image. The camera often caught him laughing with children, playing badminton, or tying his mother’s shoelaces. We were not looking at the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family. What he saw was a man, just like any of us.
Across the world, Zohran Mamdani, the young New York Assemblyman, embodies this same shift. His social media presence is a blend of sharp progressive politics and local community updates. He speaks directly to the cultural grammar of millennial and Gen-Z audiences. His content is equal parts serious and self-aware. The feed looks like a moodboard for progressive politics and being effortlessly cool. He has a vibe, as the kids call it these days.
The contemporary politician is now performing in a visual economy where how you say something matters more than what you say. It’s no coincidence that political content today borrows from influencer culture. The informal tone, the jump-cut video edits, the use of trending sounds are all signals of the familiarity with the algorithmic vernacular.
The aesthetic shift is striking. The older generation of politicians curated distance. Power was meant to be awe-inspiring, not approachable. Their appeal rested on stature. The new class of digital politicians is all for the softboi, 'pookie' aesthetics. They post pictures in sneakers and hoodies, reply to comments with emojis, share playlists and personal reflections. Their power comes from accessibility, or the feeling of it.
The Visual Politics of Ordinariness
Relatability is a visual strategy. In a world where audiences scroll past power suits and podiums, politicians now rely on the power of ordinariness.
While the performance of simplicity is not new to Indian politics, the medium is different. Humility and simplicity must be communicated within a 15-second reel. The same way luxury brands sell minimalism as authenticity, politicians now sell simplicity as sincerity.
This performative intimacy is a calculated response to how digital audiences consume politics. The modern voter, especially the young voter, is a scrolling citizen. With everything they have read about in history, they are naturally skeptical of institutions, drawn to personality, and emotionally fluent in the languages of irony and memes.
Consequently, relatability has become political currency. A viral video of a leader laughing awkwardly or showing vulnerability can do more to shape perception than a 20-page policy manifesto.
Social media also collapses contexts. The same platform that carries celebrity gossip carries parliamentary news. For politicians, this means they must compete not just with each other, but with influencers, comedians, and creators, all of whom speak internet language.
Politics in the Attention Economy
This competition for visibility has fundamentally reshaped political behaviour. Social media’s reward system values metrics over information. A tearful speech or a witty clap-back travels way faster than a voter scam or MLA buying.
The logic of virality has started to govern digital politics. Politicians are no longer merely representatives; they are producers of content. In such an attention economy, even empathy becomes aesthetic. The more ‘human’ a politician seems, the better they perform in the algorithm. Politics thus drifts closer to performance art, and further from service of the people.
There’s a moral dimension to all this. Relatability feels democratic. It suggests humility, and connection, both of which are qualities that make politics seem less alienating. When Rahul Gandhi listens to farmers or Mamdani knocks on tenants’ doors, the imagery communicates care in a way that transcends policy jargon. It says, “I see you.”
For a generation that distrusts institutions but craves meaning, seeing their leaders be real feels revolutionary. The parasocial intimacy between voters and politicians becomes a form of belonging. The leader becomes one of them, and the invisible wall is broken.
But relatability also has its limits. When every act of empathy becomes content, sincerity becomes hard to measure. The distinction between solidarity and self-promotion blurs. Can walking with the poor replace the work of policy? Does a candid photo stand in for structural reform?
The Performance of Authenticity
The irony of authentic politics is that it demands enormous choreography. What looks casual is often carefully curated. Behind every apparently spontaneous selfie is a communications team, a camera person, a copywriter.
Behind the relatable post is a paid media budget, boosting the content into the feeds of precisely targeted demographics. The lighting is natural only because someone decided it should be. The lines between reel and real are blurred even more.
I don’t have a clear answer to if these moves are inherently disingenuous. Maybe, it simply reflects the new logic of representation. Politics, like culture, now lives in the performance of being seen. The old power structure depended on distance while the new one depends on visibility.
There’s a risk, however, that the politics of personality can overshadow the politics of principle. When an image becomes the message, the space for actual substance becomes minimal. Voters may connect with a leader’s vibe but disengage from the complexity of their vision. The danger is not that politics becomes performative (it always has been) but that the performance becomes the point.
At its best, relatability can humanise power. At its worst, it can trivialise it. When politics adopts the cadence of influencer culture, it invites the same pitfalls. It can lead to audience burnout, oversharing and moral exhibitionism. Leaders are incentivised to emote more than to act, to narrate suffering rather than to alleviate it.
There’s also a structural asymmetry at play. Social media privileges the visually fluent and the algorithmically literate.
A young, English-speaking, meme-savvy politician like Zohran Mamdani will inevitably find it easier to connect than a grassroots leader who operates in regional or non-digital spaces. The platform rewards personality, not necessarily policy or ground experience.
Perhaps this is what politics in the digital age ultimately seeks. In a socially fragmented world, people are not looking for leaders they can vote for; they want leaders they can relate to. That is what politicians are doing. The “You and I are in this together” narrative. The risk is that the digital intimacy they cultivate may ultimately serve the platform more than the people.
Between Image and Intimacy
The relatable politician is the inevitable product of our times. They are a hybrid of activist, influencer, and statesman, fluent in the dialect of the internet. Their presence feels closer, their tone warmer and their image softer. They walk among us, quite literally sometimes.
But the test of leadership is not how relatable one appears online, but how responsible one remains offline. If social media has humanised politics, it has also commodified it by turning empathy into engagement metrics, compassion into clicks and sincerity into strategy.
In the end, the most radical thing a politician might do in the age of endless performance is not to be relatable, but to be real even when no one is watching. Especially when no one is watching.
(Farnaz Fatima has a postgraduate degree in Politics and International Studies. Currently working in advertising, she is interested in exploring the intersections of gender, mental health and popular culture through her writing. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)