All rights reserved info:eu-repo/semantics/bookPart eng Pandemic and Crisis Discourse Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy application/pdf 40244786 bytes 2022 From an invisible enemy to a football match with the virus : Adjusting the Covid-19 pandemic metaphors to political agendas in Serbian public discourse Silaški, Nadežda Đurović, Tatjana INTRODUCTION The war metaphor, translatable into the prevalent virus is an enemy metaphor, initiated by medical scientists and professionals at the very onset of the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, was immediately embraced by politicians along with the media and the general public as an established way of thinking or as a ‘socially shared perspective’ (Charteris-Black, 2019: 16) on the coronavirus crisis. Such framing of the new viral disease is not surprising. It has been well attested in the literature that some earlier health crises, such as AIDS, Ebola, SARS and bird flu, were also perceived as warfare (see, for example, Joffe and Haarhoff, 2002; Larson, Nerlich and Wallis, 2005; Nerlich and Halliday, 2007; Sontag, 1989; Wallis and Nerlich, 2005). In relation to the current health situation, shaping public discourse on the coronavirus pandemic by means of the war metaphor was globally adopted, and it seems as if the militarization of language spread at an equal pace and intensity as the virus itself. Familiar lexical instantiations of this metaphor started to echo across the globe in the speeches of the world top officials, such as ‘The world is at war with a hidden enemy. WE WILL WIN!’1 (the, at the time, US president Donald Trump), ‘We are at war!’2 (the French president Emmanuel Macron) and ‘We must act like any wartime government […] yes this enemy can be deadly’ 3 (the UK prime minister Boris Johnson). It is not surprising then that such conceptualization of the Covid-19 pandemic was accepted in Serbian public discourse as well, and served ‘to create a “common ground” for communication between the media, the public, and policy makers’ (Nerlich, Hamilton and Rowe, 2002: 93). The Serbian political elite, among them the authoritarian president Aleksandar Vučić as the prime example, gladly embraced the war frame and was no exception in this regard. From the very onset of the pandemic, Vučić’s government implemented some of the toughest restrictions in Europe, with curfews lasting as long as 84 hours. He himself threatened the citizens that if measures were not obeyed, Serbians would face the ‘Italian scenario’ of an uncontrolled pandemic stressing that ‘all the cemeteries would be too small to accommodate all of us.’4 The war metaphor proved to be an effective pragmatic tool which guides the character of the speaker’s evaluation – in this case, the war against a social phenomenon – a disease, negatively evaluated and conceptualized as the ‘enemy’ (Charteris-Black, 2004: 91). This metaphor in turn helped to prepare the citizens to ‘defeat the enemy’ by accepting extremely stringent measures against the virus spread. However, other metaphors may also have important functions in public discourse in dealing with challenging issues. Such is the sport metaphor, which has already been proved to serve as an apt tool for deliberately shaping and constructing a particular discourse in a desired manner (e.g. Charteris-Black, 2004, 2005; Howe, 1988; Semino, 2008). We believe that the Serbian political elite was fully aware of the power of metaphor to impact the reasoning, judgement, and the ways social and economic issues are conceived of by public discourse participants. This metaphor proved to be extremely effective when an urgent need arose to change the war metaphorical framework, by then predominantly used for the structuring the Covid-19 pandemic. A sudden and a quite unexpected twist in the already planned schedule immediately called for a change in metaphorical framing – aggressive aspects of the war metaphor were required to be urgently changed into a softer, subtler and less adversarial metaphor – that of sport. The purpose of this sudden, but deliberate, shift was to suit the best interests of the political elite, the main one being to prepare the electorate to participate in the elections, despite the obvious risk to public health amid the pandemic. The chapter unfolds in the following way: after this Introduction, in ‘Theoretical framework and objectives’ we provide a short account of the theoretical framework our chapter is is guided by – critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004, 2019; Musolff, 2006, 2016; Semino, 2008), followed by ‘Data and method’ which describes our data and method. ‘The war metaphor’ and ‘The sport metaphor’ portray the war and sport metaphors respectively, used in Serbian public discourse for conceptualizing the Covid-19 pandemic as tools of shifting the cognitive framework so as to serve and preserve the interests of political elites. Finally, in the last section we offer some concluding remarks. https://phaidrabg.bg.ac.rs/o:30325 doi:10.5040/9781350232730.ch-015