One is a wildly popular, seemingly happy-go-lucky YouTuber from Cyprus. The other is a brash, fringe figure of Spain's far right who rails against unauthorised immigrants. They both are new members of the European Parliament thanks to their savvy use of video-based social media.
YouTuber and TikToker Fidias Panayiotou is a 24-year-old with no political experience and no formal higher education who rode the wave of his online popularity - and public anger at the country's political elites - all the way to one of six seats allotted to Cyprus in the European Parliament. He says he'll keep using social media "as my biggest weapon to use" when he formally takes up his new job as a legislator in Brussels and Strasbourg, France.
Widely addressed by his first name, Fidias secured a remarkable one in five votes cast in Sunday's election without the support of any political party - until now, thought to be the be-all and end-all of getting elected in any political contest in Cyprus.
Fidias sent shockwaves through the Cypriot political system by running a campaign in which he took no political positions, made no promises or even presented a program for his time in office.
"It seems now that people are hungry not for political positions, but for true people that are not lying (but) saying the truth," he told The Associated Press in an interview in English, the language he uses for most of his posts.
Riding the wave: While Fidias avoided strong political positions and was already widely known for his online high jinks, Spaniard Alvise Perez was mostly unknown until he leveraged his diatribes on Instagram and Telegram against the alleged dangers of immigration. He also railed against claims of widespread corruption among politicians to score not one, but three of the 61 seats Spain gets in the European Parliament.
The common factor between the Alvise and Fidias is that both hit the bullseye thanks to their mastery of social media to garner support among young people, many of whom may have been indifferent to politics.
"This is not just a Spanish phenomenon or only about a YouTuber in Cyprus," Steven Forti, a professor of history at Barcelona's Autonomous University and expert on the far right, told the AP.
Forti said the creation of "digital subcultures" around unorthodox candidates had been critical to the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and, more recently, Javier Milei in Argentina, as well as far-right figures across Europe. But this dynamic has been turbocharged by the increasingly video-based trends in social media.
"The newer types of digital platforms like TikTok and Instagram have clearly accelerated" the fragmentation of politics, Forti said, because they help the far right achieve its two main objectives of disseminating their ideas very quickly and making themselves appear as everyday, normal people.
Provocative fun: Fidias has spent the last five years boosting his popularity with outrageous video posts of him spending wads of cash in Vietnam, living a week in an airport for free, and burying himself alive for 10 days.