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The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has reached most countries in the world. In the field of political communication, it is an unprecedented challenge for world political leaders. The aim of this research is to analyze the war rhetoric of Pedro Sánchez, President of Spain, one of the countries most affected by the pandemic. It takes his official speeches delivered from March 10 to April 22 as a reference. Content analysis is used with a procedure created for this case, under the approach of the Critical Discourse Analysis and combining a quantitative and qualitative perspective. After a thorough bibliographical review on the use of war rhetoric in public discourse, a corpus of lexical units w identified and interpreted in context: 101 lexical units and 359 phrases or metaphors with war or military reminiscences are detected in the 13 discourses of the corpus. The greatest "warlike weight" concentrates on the most serious moments and on the victims and those infected during the crisis. The war is the transmission vehicle used by the President of the Spanish Government to convey, in a simple, visual, and moving way, a government decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Political debates on television were usually designed to provide viewers trustful information about the political candidates and their manifestos. Unfortunately, the political situation and the communication media have undergone such a change that those manifestos have become mere mediatic representations. In this article, we will analyze how the speech and the actantial position of the candidates get adjusted according to the mediatic show to become the winners, or in the best scenario, as television heroes, or maybe just the opposite. Method: Our main objective is not empirical but theoretical and methodological. We do not wish to describe the electoral debates in Spain. We are trying to highlight a model of analysis, which can be applied to different contexts, so we can contribute to fix a series of operative concepts, in a new framework. Results: To apply the suggested model will allow, among other things, to identify not only the political mediatization effects but also the marked tendency to create ceremonial gestalt in front of planned mediatic events. At the same, time it will allow to identify the aggressiveness and conflictive graduation of the different presidential candidates on the televised debates. Conclusions: From our point of view, it is a clear correlation with the polarization index that public opinion has experienced as well as a tendency to a conflictual spectacularization that television genres have developed in the last decades as a new way of doing politics and journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze, as an example of oral political discourse, the songs of two main Spanish politics parties, during the general 2008 elections. As other texts of political discourse (such as speech, interviews, meetings, posters, advertisings, etc.), these songs that accompanied the electoral propaganda are part of a public and ideological discourse aimed at the election of a candidate (perlocutive object). The elector voting for the candidate must believe that he is the best option available. Thus, the candidate's discourse is directed so the elector knows that the candidate and his party are the best options (legitimation), while it presents the opposing candidate as the worst one (delegitimation). The results of the analysis show that these strategies, quite typical in political discourse, have some new elements such as their resemblance to commercial advertising, i.e. the testimonials by famous people. Even if the political songs are a traditional genre with conventional communicative aims (propaganda and persuasion), they display some typical features in contemporary and postmodern communication: colloquiality, informality, "carnivalization", syncretism and hibridation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]