As Spain readies for elections, mainstream politicians have followed Indignados and Podemos on to smartphone app in attempt to reconnect with a disenchanted public

Tucked among selfies and inspirational status updates, Borja Gutiérrez Iglesias’s profile photo shows him casually perched on the edge of a fountain. His status reads “At your disposition to listen.”

With just months left before municipal elections in Spain, Gutiérrez Iglesias, the People’s party mayor of Brunete, near Madrid, has taken his campaign to the next frontier: WhatsApp.

“It’s been about a month since we went around giving every resident my phone number,” said Gutiérrez Iglesias, who has headed the small town of about 10,000 people since 2011. After taking to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, WhatsApp – a smartphone application that allows users to send and receive free texts to anyone in their contact list – felt like the final frontier, he said.

Since launching the campaign “Call me or write [to] me on my phone!”, he checks the app on his phone at all hours, responding to most messages within minutes. Messages stream in all day; from as early as 6am and sometimes until 1am.

In a key election year, Gutiérrez Iglesias is one of several Spanish politicians who has turned to WhatsApp in recent months in an attempt to woo voters. Murcia’s Rubén Juan Serna and Madrid’s Ramón Marcos, both politicians for the centrist Union, Progress and Democracy, have handed out their numbers, while in Boadilla del Monte, a small town in the outskirts of Madrid, residents are invited to fill in an online form so that they can “WhatsApp with the mayor”.

Initially Gutiérrez Iglesias was a little nervous about the idea: “I was sure I would get a lot of prank calls.” While he has yet to receive one, “I’m sure that I’ll receive some at some point,” he said.

Most residents text him with easy questions such as the cost to rent a padel tennis court for an hour in the town’s recreation centre, he said, or want to flag problems with trees or pavements.

Some have lashed out at Gutiérrez Iglesias, who is entangled in a judicial investigation over allegations that he attempted to bribe an opposition councillor into joining the People’s party, which forms a minority town council administration. “I’ve received a few critical messages. But really that’s what we’re there for – to listen to the people, no matter what they think or say.”

The only downside, he said, has been the blurring of his personal and professional lives. “Your personal life is reduced to zero,” he said, shrugging it off. “But that’s part of the job.”

Spanish politicians’ embrace of WhatsApp has been driven by necessity, said Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí, a communication consultant, as WhatsApp has made it’s way on to 99% of the phones in Spain the past four years. “There’s nothing else like it. It has colonised messaging,” with a Spanish doctor even diagnosing the first known case of WhatsAppitis, a repetitive strain injury caused by texting. Campaigns by the Socialists and Catalonia’s Republican Left have capitalised on the app’s popularity in a passive way, inviting supporters to register for updates via WhatsApp.

But as the chasm between Spaniards and their institutions grew in the wake of the economic crisis, others seized on WhatsApp to actively mark a difference between the establishment and themselves. He pointed to movements such as Indignados (Outraged) and Podemos (We Can). “The new political realities that are emerging have made social networks their natural ecosystem,” Gutiérrez-Rubí said, turning politics into a two-way dialogue.

The establishment has been left with little choice but to follow. “If you want to ask people to vote for you, you want to influence people, you want to be a political reference,” Gutiérrez-Rubí said, “you have to insert yourself in the conversation, which has become a digital conversation.”