Is anyone here from a country NOT called USA where they pile up a bunch of people in the background of a politician who then gets applause for everything?
I have literally never seen this in Europe. In Germany, we’d probably consider this “weird” in case our politicians did that. Feels a bit like clicking the thumbs-up button of my own social media post…
I’m in the UK, and politicians do this too at campaign rallies now, and have done so for some years. We certainly took this from US style electioneering.
It’s all about optics - it supposedly looks good for a politician to be talking and people enthusiastically cheering on in the background. It kind of makes sense if you accept that all that will be shown on TV or social media is a clip from a speech, so you want to try and package that with as positive a spin on it as possible. The political party can control the background this way and it’s impossible for the media companies to edit it out.
I can’t speak for other European countries, but I have seen clips from other electioneering videos with a similar set up, so it’s not just the US and the UK. For example: This article from SBS in Australia (one of their public service broadcasters) has a picture of exactly this phenomenon: https://www.sbs.com.au/language/gujarati/en/article/profile-of-australian-labor-party/ji29c0grz
But I’m pretty certain we in the UK took this from the US in the last 15-20 years maybe? I don’t know if it came from somewhere else before? I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s older than we think!