Marching Against a Rising and Manipulative Threat: Metaphorical Constructions of Populism in the Spanish and the Italian Press

Whereas the use of metaphors in populist political communication has been widely studied, few works have considered the way in which the concept of populism is constructed through metaphors in the public sphere and in the media. By applying Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) to a sample of newspaper articles published in Spain and Italy, we detect the main metaphorical frameworks used for discursively constructing populism in countries characterized by a polarized pluralist media system. Results show that populism is metaphorized in less than half of the analyzed items and that there are three common source domains for conceptualizing the term: path/travel/movement, conflict/war/crime and personification. While similar narratives can be drawn from the use of these source domains, different perspectives appear when looking at newspapers' political leanings.