Speaker
Description
Crises are not only disruptions of political and social order but also mediated performances through which legitimacy, identity, and power are negotiated. This research examines how the Russo-Ukrainian War was transformed into a discursive tool in French political communication, focusing on Marine Le Pen’s Twitter activity during the 2022 presidential campaign. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and Wodak’s discourse-historical approach, the study explores how Le Pen constructed the war as a “crisis” to reinforce polarization, evoke affective alignment, and promote a populist vision of national sovereignty. The analysis reveals how digital media affordances – brevity, emotional immediacy, and multimodality – enabled the populist dramatization of crisis and the reframing of global conflict as a domestic struggle. Through discursive strategies, Le Pen reoriented public attention from the international arena to domestic concerns, performing a narrative of national victimhood and resilience under threat. Her digital communication exemplifies how mediated crisis performances merge emotional appeal with claims of rational leadership, blurring boundaries between solidarity, sovereignty, and sustainability. The research highlights how populist actors exploit the multimodal affordances of social media to reframe crises as moral and political struggles, shaping perceptions of legitimacy and belonging. Ultimately, the analysis sheds light on the interplay between populist discourse, digital media logics, and the mediated construction of crisis, offering insights into how contemporary communication sustains affective polarization and challenges democratic resilience in times of instability.
| Keywords | crisis discourse, populism, digital media, Russo-Ukrainian war, critical discourse analysis |
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| olena.siden@helsinki.fi |