When the National Security Council tweeted out on Narenda Modi’s meeting with President Obama, I realized that Modi has 9.7 million twitter followers (which makes sense, given India’s population), which got me interested in whether there was another world leader who had more than Modi.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far (I’m including the Dalai Lama and Pope for comparison purposes).
Barack Obama: 53.7M
Pope Francis (17.6M combined, with lots of obvious overlap): Spanish 7.8M, English 5.4M, Portuguese 1.3M, Italian 2.9M, Arabic 180k, Latin 319K, German 242K
Dalai Lama: 10.2M
Narendra Modi: 9.7M
Recep Tayyip Erdogan: 5.6M
Enrique Pena Nieto: 3.54M
Juan Manuel Santos (Colombia): 3.52M
Cristina Kirchner: 3.5M
Dilma Roussef: 3.2M
Joko Widodo (President of Indonesia): 2.66M
Najib Razak (PM of Malaysia): 2.33M
Nicolas Maduro: 2.23M
Rafael Correa (President of Ecuador): 1.97M
Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud: 1.6M
David Cameron: 900K
Francois Hollande 858K
Paul Kagame (Rwanda): 787K
Uhuru Kenyatta: 715K
Stephen Harper: 650K English, 17.9K French
Bibi Netanyahu: 355K Hebrew, 190K English
Shinzo Abe: 446K
Tony Abbott (Australia): 430K
Hassan Rouhani: 119K Persian, 293K English
Park Geun-Hye (South Korea): 372K
Jacob Zuma: 348K
John Key (New Zealand): 149K
Luis Guillermo Solis (Costa Rica): 133K
Lee Hsien Loong (Singapore): 128K
Michelle Bachelet (Chile): 59K
Evo Morales: 56K
Goodluck Jonathan (Nigeria): 25K
Abdel Fattah Elsisi: 1.8K (no tweets)
Enda Kenny (Irish Taoiseach): 26K
No twitter account: Angela Merkel