Two weeks after Exército do Lula went from 55,000 to 10 million followers in Brazil, two channels in Spain are trying the same thing ahead of the 29 November general election. Neither is a party's official channel. Why they are copying Lula, what each of their two approaches gains and loses, and what PP is doing in the meantime is in How PSOE and Frente Amplio are copying Lula's WhatsApp playbook.
LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE ("the strength of the people") is a channel run by PSOE supporters. It was created on 8 October, takes its name from the Socialists' campaign slogan, and posts rally clips, memes and Pedro Sánchez posters. The official PSOE channel still exists, but it barely moves: 5,185 followers on 10 October, 5,524 on the 28th.
FRENTEAMPLISTAS has a different story. It was the official channel of Frente Amplio, Ada Colau's left coalition, and it was called "Frente Amplio 29N". Between 26 and 27 October it changed its name and its tone: it stopped talking like a party and started talking like an activist channel, with "missions" and follower targets, just like Janones's. Since then Frente Amplio has had no official channel.
We transcribed every post on both channels by hand from screenshots taken on 29 October: 94 from LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE (10 to 28 October) and 45 from FRENTEAMPLISTAS (14 to 29 October). For each one we noted the format, the time, the reactions and the forwards. The follower counts come from our ranking of Spanish parties on WhatsApp, which reads the channels every day.
In short. LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE is bigger and FRENTEAMPLISTAS is more effective. The Frente Amplio channel posts half as much and, per follower, gets a third more engagement and half again as many forwards. LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE has more followers and the most viral post of the two, but the rest of what it posts does less.
Who has more followers
Both channels spent their first weeks almost unnoticed. LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE had about 1,300 followers on 11 October, according to an Internet Archive capture. FRENTEAMPLISTAS, still the official channel, had 927 on 16 October and stalled at around 3,200 until the 26th.
On 27 October both took off at once, two days after Lula won in Brazil. At 14:20 LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE announced 7,000 followers, and by 19:25 it had 14,182. FRENTEAMPLISTAS went from "more than 5,000" at midday to 22,779 before midnight.
| LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE | FRENTEAMPLISTAS | |
|---|---|---|
| First reading | 1,300 (11 Oct) | 927 (16 Oct) |
| Before take-off | about 7,000 (27 Oct, 14:20) | 3,204 (26 Oct) |
| 29 October | 40,000 | 35,000 |
| Total growth | ×30 in 18 days | ×38 in 13 days |
| Final sprint | ×5.7 in two days | ×11 in three days |
LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE is bigger, by 5,000 followers. FRENTEAMPLISTAS was faster: it multiplied its audience elevenfold in three days, right after the name change.
Who gets more out of each follower
Comparing raw reactions doesn't work when a channel had 2,000 followers one week and 40,000 the next. So we measured each post against the followers the channel had when it was posted, and we use the median, the typical post, because a single LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE post skews the average.
| Per post (median) | LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE | FRENTEAMPLISTAS |
|---|---|---|
| Posts published | 94 | 45 |
| Posts per day | 4.9 | 2.8 |
| Reactions + forwards, % of followers | 3.7% | 4.9% |
| Reactions, % of followers | 2.3% | 2.7% |
| Forwards, % of followers | 1.0% | 1.5% |
| Reactions | 73 | 224 |
| Forwards | 32 | 109 |
FRENTEAMPLISTAS posts half as much and each post does more. The biggest gap is in forwards, which is what counts on a WhatsApp channel: channels don't show up in search or in any feed, so they only grow when someone forwards a message to a group or a contact.
Which formats work on each channel
LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE runs on video: 50 of its 94 posts are rally clips, interviews or memes. They do reasonably well, and so do the posters. Stickers are this channel's own bet (15 posts; Frente Amplio posts none) and they do less than half as well as an image. Plain text does even worse.
On FRENTEAMPLISTAS the best format is the voice note. It has posted only four, from Ada Colau, from Edu Rubiño and from Alicia, a volunteer, and their median is almost twice that of any other format. Each one is announced first with a text post ("Ada Colau has a message for you"). What works worst are text posts with links to Instagram, X or the press: they ask the reader to leave WhatsApp, and most don't.
One more figure applies to both: posts published between 12:00 and 18:00 do better than morning posts. On FRENTEAMPLISTAS the gap is 6.9% against 2.9%; on LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE, 4.3% against 3.0%.
What moves most is talking about the channel itself
Sort the posts by engagement and nothing about housing, pensions or Feijóo makes the top. The posts at the top are about the channel itself: how many of us there are, how many we want to be, thanks for joining.
The most viral post on either channel is LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE's "SOMOS YA 7.000" ("we're already 7,000") from 27 October. It asked people to forward the channel "to 3 friends, or 4 years of PP government" and was forwarded 10,000 times. The channel had about 7,000 followers at the time, so it was forwarded more times than there were people to read it.
FRENTEAMPLISTAS did the same thing with more method. Its "Objetivo 10.000" ("target: 10,000"), at 12:13 on the 27th, set a goal, a task ("tap here and send it to 4 friends right now") and a short link. It was forwarded 2,000 times, 40% of its followers at the time. From then on the channel narrated the countdown ("1,700 to go for 10,000", "last 400 to reach 15,000") and promised a reward when it got there: an audio message from Ada Colau. It went out at 20:18 and got more than 1,000 reactions and more than 1,000 forwards.
This is Exército do Lula's script almost step by step: a target with a number, a mission for every follower, and a reward when it's done. FRENTEAMPLISTAS follows it more closely. LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE has the same ingredient in one post, and the rest of its content looks more like a party's Instagram account.
Javier Toret and Rocío Guerrero describe it in El Salto: Exército do Lula "organised virality" instead of waiting for something to go viral, and one of their lessons is to set concrete, observable, short-term goals. That is what "Objetivo 10.000" and the countdown do. As we explain in our piece on the two channels' strategy, Camila Modanez adds in Página/12 that Janones's achievement was creating "a dynamic of participation", because "organised people have a much greater capacity for action than individuals who simply consume content".
In 77 of the 93 LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE posts with figures, the Brazilian flag is among the four most-used reactions, and that was already true of its first post on 10 October. On FRENTEAMPLISTAS it appears on none. We can't know who is reacting, but the Socialist channel's audience has carried the Brazilian model in its reactions from day one.
The cost of growing this fast
Followers who arrive in a wave of forwards engage much less than the ones who were already there, and on FRENTEAMPLISTAS it shows:
| FRENTEAMPLISTAS, median per post | Posts | Reactions + forwards, % of followers |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 25 October | 17 | 6.4% |
| 26 October (Lula's win) | 3 | 17.5% |
| 27 October (the sprint) | 11 | 7.5% |
| 28 and 29 October | 14 | 1.9% |
Engagement per follower over the last two days is less than a third of what the channel had before the sprint. Part of the drop may be down to the subject: on 28 October the channel suspended campaigning to cover the train crash at Urda, with public-service posts (helplines, blood donation points) that aren't looking for the same kind of response. But it's also a sign that the 30,000 newcomers don't yet behave like the 3,000 who were there at the start. LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE posted only twice after its sprint, too few to tell whether the same is happening there.
What campaign teams can take from this
Ask for one concrete thing and put a number on it. The most-forwarded posts on both channels ask people to forward the channel to an exact number of people ("3 friends", "4 friends") with a target in sight. Posts that only inform get forwarded far less.
Use voice. Voice notes are the best format on FRENTEAMPLISTAS, and two of its four, Edu Rubiño's of 27 October and Ada Colau's, are among its most engaged posts. LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE hasn't posted one.
Don't flood the channel. LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE posts almost five times a day, and its most common formats (videos and stickers) do less than its posters. FRENTEAMPLISTAS posts half as much and gets more from each post.
Post in the afternoon. On both channels, posts between 12:00 and 18:00 do better than morning ones.
Think about the newcomers. Both channels greeted them ("To the 10,000 of you who joined today", "See you tomorrow FRENTEAMPLISTAS!"), but neither has yet given them a reason to stay and take part. FRENTEAMPLISTAS's drop on 28 and 29 October shows that's now the job. For more on how organizations use channels, we have a guide to WhatsApp Channels for political and social organizations.
Verdict
FRENTEAMPLISTAS wins on effectiveness and LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE wins on size. The Frente Amplio channel posts half as much and, per follower, gets a third more engagement and half again as many forwards. It also grew twice as fast in the final sprint. It copied Exército do Lula's method better: missions with a number, audio from the leaders and volunteers talking to camera.
LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE has more followers and the most viral post of the two, but it relies on that one hit; the rest of its content does less. Between now and 29 November both face the same problem: the audience they picked up in two days engages a good deal less than the one they already had.
It's worth not overstating what a channel can do, though: Lula didn't win thanks to Exército do Lula alone either. And while the left grows for free with channels, PP has chosen to send paid messages through the official WhatsApp API, which Meta closes to parties. We cover it in How PSOE and Frente Amplio are copying Lula's WhatsApp playbook.
How we measured it
We transcribed every post from screenshots taken on 29 October 2026. Reactions and forwards are the ones shown that day, so an older post has had more time to collect them, including from followers who arrived later. That inflates engagement on the oldest posts slightly.
We estimated the followers at the time of each post by joining with straight lines our daily readings, one Internet Archive capture, and the figures the channels announced themselves ("SOMOS YA 7.000", "1,700 to go for 10,000"). For LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE we have only three points between 11 and 27 October, so its curve is rougher than Frente Amplio's.
WhatsApp rounds large figures: we recorded a "1K" or "10K" as 1,000 or 10,000. One LA FUERZA DE LA GENTE post, the poster for the Gijón rally on 26 October, has no figures and is left out of the medians. Formats with fewer than three posts are left out of the formats chart.
The per-post data is in a CSV for anyone who wants to check it: posts from both channels with reactions, forwards and estimated followers. The follower history is in the wha.tools open dataset, under CC BY 4.0.
