Monografico_5_EN_Doxa_31_Analysis_of_the_discursive

century (2002, 2007 and 2011), its voter support had only a slight impact until 2019. As pointed out by Ferreira (2019: 74), this ultra-right-wing political grouping in Spain was very much divided and “has usually shown a clear anti-democratic bias”.

In 2019, the arrival of Vox in parliamentary institutions changed this trend. However, Vox had already made its presence felt in national politics several years earlier, as it was founded in 2013 by several members of the Partido Popular (PP) (Popular Party) who were critical of Mariano Rajoy’s management in economic matters and in relation to peripheral nationalist groups, as well as the alleged cases of corruption within this political party. Among its founders was Santiago Abascal, elected president of the party in 2014. Vox is considered to be another representative of the European radical right, a defender of nationalism, nativism, authoritarianism, populism, traditional values, and neo-liberalism. As demonstrated by Acha (2019) and Oñate (2021), within a timeframe of just seven years, Vox has introduced into the Spanish political discourse an agenda of issues and communication strategies that were scarcely present in the national media context when it began.

However, the presence of Vox in the media has not been continuous. According to the Factiva database, in 2014 (the year after its founding), the terms Vox or Abascal appeared only 180 times in the newspapers analysed in this work, a figure that varied slightly until 2018, when it appeared in 2,819 news articles. In this sense, Olalla, Chueca Montuenga, and Moreno Torres (14/01/2019) point out that during the campaign of the Andalusian regional elections in December of 2018, in which Vox achieved representation in a regional parliament for the first time, “it received more attention in Spain than parties with similar voting objectives (e.g. PACMA), and also obtained a considerable level of coverage compared to the main political parties”. Referring to this same media coverage, Enguix Oliver and Gallardo Paúls (2020, in press) have described it as “excessive for a party without any presence in the institutions”. This has led us to question whether this same trend was maintained during the April 2019 election campaign.

The role played by the media in the rise of right-wing populism in Europe has been the subject of analysis in recent years (Walgrave and De Swert, 2004; Esser, Stepinska and Hopmann, 2016; Ekström and Morton, 2017; Doroshenko, 2018), However, according to Esser et al. (2016), there is still a lot of work to be done. Various studies point to the influence that the media have had on the growth of these parties (Wodak, 2015; Doroshenko, 2018; Murphy and Devine, 2018). For example, the increased coverage of certain issues such as immigration or nationalism, as well as the framework within which they are addressed and their traditional association with certain parties, was the subject analysed in the work of Walgrave and De Swert (2004) on the rise of the Dutch party known as the Vlaams Blok. According to Esser et al. (2016), the traditional media system follows three patterns in relation to populist movements: (1) Some countries have chosen to provide only slight coverage as long as these parties only had scarce parliamentary representation and the buffer line of the rest of the parties toward these groupings has allowed this to occur; (2) Others have opted for clearly negative coverage, which has not prevented the rise of these political groups; and (3) a choice has been made to offer critical coverage without ever losing sight of the damage that such populist discourse might inflict on national democratic health. With regard to the case of Spain, in their analysis of the media coverage of Vox during the 2018 Andalusian elections, Enguix Oliver and Gallardo Paúls (2020, in press) identified a predominance of patterns (2) and (3).