Political construction of Nayib Bukele on Twitter in the context of COVID-19

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the use of Twitter as a communication channel by the president of El Salvador,
Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele), an outsider, who is also considered the ‘millennial’ president of that nation and who strongly employs this digital platform for the dissemination of its government policies. The present analysis is landed and justified in the context of COVID-19, characterized by the taking of restrictive confinement measures at the regional and local level, with a strong struggle between the executive and the Salvadoran legislative apparatus, as well as the impact of the virus on all corners of the globe. As a temporality, the April- June quarter of 2020 is taken, for a total corpus of 766 messages. Through content analysis, the role of the political actor in a health crisis, the presence of struggles with the political class, the construction of the category of people applied to the Central American nationality, the polarization present in their agenda and others are analyzed. Elements of interest within the construction of the ‘us-them’ dichotomy in a digital environment. As the main finding, it is obtained that Bukele is framed within two characterizations; the first coupled with confronting political and social actors (mainly the legislative apparatus), an environment strongly marked by polarization; and the second, where he connects with citizens through charisma and the use of a close and positive language, in which cases polarization becomes an absent element and integration is called for.