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This article delves into the analysis of political communication between two Croatian political leaders, Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and President Zoran Milanović, through the prism of the infantilization of politics as part of the broader context of the infantilization of society. To achieve this, the article introduces selected theoretical theses on the infantilization of society and on how the expression of infantile (political) disgust, as a speech act, contaminates and pollutes the community. By employing Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper aims to illustrate how, in the case of these two politicians, the infantilization of politics is characterized by the replacement of political discourse with personal insults, witticism, affectation, and emotions such as disgust, occasionally intertwined with elements of narcissism. Exploring how their political discourse tends to be personalized and even celebritized, the paper shows how it further contributes to the overall infantilization of society.

The paper discusses a specific intersection of the politics, celebrity, and digital culture. In the last few decades, more and more people from the entertainment realm entered the world of institutional politics trying to leverage their popularity. Thanks to the media, they manage to transfer their celebrity capital, namely accumulated media visibility and recognisability (Driesens 2013) into the political sphere. In the beginning, they improve their visibility with the help of mass media that place their personas and private lives in the focus of public attention. However, with the digitalization of the media, the popular-political landscape has changed (Marshall 2020), so today they have dispositional new bases for practising personalized politics, i.e. imposing their personality instead of political party programmes. In this paper, attention is directed to former American president Donald Trump, president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Miroslav Škoro, who was a candidate in the presidential, parliamentary, and local elections in Croatia. Although there were obvious differences between these three celebrities mentioned before entering the political arena, their later use of social networks vividly shows how they built their political/pandemic persona in the evolving mediatization of politics.