Speaking as a woman: the political communication of Ursula von der Leyen

This study analyses the institutional and social media communication of Ursula von der Leyen during her first mandate as President of the European Commission, focusing on how political themes are articulated across platforms. Using Symmetric Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (SNMF), we extracted and compared thematic clusters from a corpus of official speeches, Instagram posts, and X (formerly Twitter) messages. Findings show that while core themes—such as the European Green Deal, international security, and democratic values—are consistently present, their framing varies significantly by platform. X emphasizes timely and policy-driven discourse; Instagram highlights personal leadership and symbolic presence; speeches develop complex programmatic arguments. These communicative variations align with existing theories of mediatized leadership and suggest a platform-sensitive rhetorical strategy. The study contributes to debates on political communication and digital leadership within EU institutions, offering a replicable method for cross-platform discourse analysis.