Πολιτική επικοινωνία και image making στην Ελλάδα: οι βουλευτικές εκλογές του 2004

Abstract

The pre-electoral period preceding the March 2004 parliamentary elections presents great interest, due to the extensive use the two greatest Greek political parties make of political communication media and, mainly, the typed language. The use of these two media plays a major role in the parties’ electoral strategy. In the parliamentary elections of 2004 the Mass Media created a fertile communicative environment, so that they could impose – by reproducing political speech – the policy of the two parties fighting for the government, that is, PASOK and Nea Demokratia. The final electoral results, however, are not as much the result of the mass media intervention as they are the result of a much more complex correlation between social and financial factors. The media, however, and, more specifically, the sample of Athens press, which this study examines, has had an important role. Aim of this study is the examination of the factors that have contributed to the final results of the 2004 parliamentary elections. We wish to show that the creation of a media reality with respect to the political condition is indeed recorded in the written media in the pre-electoral period, in an intensity, however, which does not bring the desired results. The electoral results are different to those that the written media try to impose and seem to be rather the result of the contribution of other social and financial factors. This study follows an analytical theoretic methodology, combined with intensive bibliographical research. The innovation of the study lies in that it contrasts the themes featuring in the press reports released by the two parties fighting for the Greek Government to the themes featuring and the messages projected in a corpus of Athens newspapers. As a first step we set the theoretical framework and distinguished the various categories, which were detectable in the Athens press. Next, we compared core variables like, press reports of the parties, diachronical gallop polls, the financial condition in the period 1990-2004 and the intentions of the middle area. We conclude that the political speech pertaining to the political parties is characterized by intense personification, vagueness and the creation of political consensus. The financial model projected by the pre-electoral speech of the parties’ political programmes is based on the liberal financial system with intense features of state intervention in favour of specific financial and social groups of the Greek society. The media create political consensus, while the political debate is a separate communicative event. Even though the society tends two support the existence of only two main parties, it simultaneously expresses the demand for clear programmes by the political parties regarding the solution of specific problems, as well as a reorientation of politics towards the sense of things and beyond impressions and images; demands which are of special value also for the contemporary political reality.