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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EU is a discursive field where multiple meanings and representations are created, negotiated and contested. Research has shown that the concept possess an interpretive power often used as an instrument of political confrontation. Such is the case, this study argues, with the two largest Macedonian parties – VMRO-DPMNE and the Social Democrats – who in a pursuit of changing or maintaining the power structuration in the society have produced a discourse on EU that best fits their political agendas. In a situation of a prolonged political crisis, and a significant involvement of EU, the two parties have commodified the discourse on EU into an instrument of self-promotion and/or criticism of the other. Demonstrating the instrumental use of the representations of EU by analysing the discursive strategies and the linguistic means deployed are the general aims of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]