Europäisch oder national, informieren oder bewerten? Die Textsorte Kommentar aus Anlass der Europawahlen 2014 – Eine Analyse bezüglich unterschiedlicher Zeitungskategorien aus Deutschland und Luxemburg

Abstract

European or national, informing or commenting? The commentary genre at the 2014 European elections – an analysis of different newspaper categories from Germany and Luxembourg The European elections held on 25 May, 2014 were the first general elections to the European Parliament after the Treaty of Lisbon, which stipulated in particular that the European Parliament should be given new powers in the election of the President of the European Commission; thus the European Parliament was gaining new power. For the first time, various parties represented in the European Parliament have seized the opportunity and named common European candidates. This new importance made the newspapers to comment on the elections. Publications from Luxembourg and Germany were of particular interest, as the common candidates came from these countries. The corpus derives from the day after the elections (Monday 26 May 2014). The result: At the level of content, the conservative newspapers have been commenting on the European elections almost exclusively from the national perspective and with regard to the national power policy. On the other hand, we find another correlation with respect to the persuasion styles. Quality magazines tend to comment in an informative style; in the case of yellow press papers, the comments more judging.

Keywords

• european elections
• illocutions
• politics
• right-left-scheme
• newspaper comments