The emergence of populism in Spain: metaphorical frames of Vox and its online community during the 2019 parliamentary elections

Abstract

In the context of the political instability shown by the calling of four general elections between 2015 and 2019, the populist party Vox gained parliamentary seats for the first time in a country that, thus far, had always remained outside of European trends. When populism, and especially the presence of far-right parties, are taken into account as a potential barometer of the health of representative politics, it is paramount to understand how these organizations build their discourses and spread them on social media. To identify the main ideas that guided Vox´s online campaign and how its community is defined, we analyzed both the morphology of the community (n1 = 1,674,681) and discourses on Twitter during the two 2019 campaign periods. The samples used (n2 = 511, n3 = 746) are made up of all the tweets posted by Vox, its presidential candidate Santiago Abascal, and the main profiles of the online community. We used critical metaphor analysis, which allows us to qualitatively approach the content of the messages and establish whether the characteristic features of populist political communication are present. The results show that, in both campaigns, the organization´s strategy was developed from the metaphorical frames of "the progressive dictatorship" as opposed to "living Spain/tradesmen/the Spain of common sense," threatened by "wild immigrants," "coup plotters," and "fake media." This framework was partially distributed among its online community.