Political alliance with COVID-19: Macedonian politics and the strategic use of the pandemic

Abstract

The emergence of COVID-19 in Macedonia in March 2020 overlapped with a period in which the country was run by a technical Government tasked to organize premature elections. In circumstances of highlighted inter-party conflict predating the health crisis, the newly emerged health emergency has only added to the political confrontation and the existing political crisis. COVID-19 and the resulting discourses on health crisis in this respect, I argue, have been used strategically by the political actors to make a populist advancement in the struggle over state power. Moreover, the strategic use of the COVID-19 by the two major political parties in a discourse marked by blame casting and (inter)dependence on past political misconduct indexes, and at the same time perpetuates, a larger ongoing political crisis in the country. To demonstrate the strategic use of the COVID-19 health discourse within the interparty conflict and its diagnostic potential to witness a prolonged political crisis, I will use internet data collected from the websites of the two largest Macedonian political parties in order to analyze the discursive strategies of predication and argumentation employed by the political parties.

Constructing images of HCWs in Chinese government Weibo posts: a discourse-historical approach

“…Besides these micro-linguistic analyses, there are also studies investigating the strategic aspect of discourse, i.e., the discursive strategies employed by the political discourse participants. Typical studies include Chepurnaya (2021) and Takovski (2021). The former cast interest in the strategic perspective of the political discourse about the pandemic, applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) concepts and Crisis Communication analytical tools to examine the discursive strategies used in Trump's tweets about the pandemic.…”