Confronting media elites? How Spanish left and right populist parties frame the media in the EU context

This paper addresses the question of how the discursive representation of disinformation and media elites by populist actors has evolved against the EU regulatory background since 2019. More specifically, it aims at shedding light on the strategies of Spanish populist parties, Podemos and Vox, and comparing them in the national and EU elections in 2019 and in 2024. The European Commission has recently put forward legislative proposals to tackle disinformation and to regulate political advertising of parties during elections, anticipating the campaigning in the run up to the 2024 European elections. In this context, this study explores the discursive strategies by Spanish populist parties, which have a prominent role in the country’s politics and a comparable populist development, as two relatively young parties, Podemos on the left and Vox on the right. The paper asks: How do Spanish populist parties frame the "media elites" and the concept of disinformation, and how the discursive strategies has evolved in a context of EU regulation on 'fake news' and party advertisement? The primary sources of the study will include the left-wing (Unidas Podemos) and the right-wing (Vox) parties’ party manifestos and party leader campaign speeches in national and the EU elections in 2019, and the data will be compared to the election campaign data of the same populist parties in the run-up to the 2024 EP elections. This study may also have implications for the literature on disinformation and party politics and more broadly, for the populist challenges to liberal democracy.