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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]