“We” in the EU: (De) legitimizing power relations and status

Abstract

Abstract The article analyzes how the leaders and the candidates of the main parties in Romania built a European field of power and subject positions in the context of the 2019 European elections. We adopt the premise that the (re) positioning of these politicians towards the EU is part of their ongoing strategies of (de) legitimization. In this respect, the study focuses on how they assign themselves a “European authority” in relation to audiences through their positioning as actors in the field. On the basis of a mainly critically discursive methodological framework, we analyze a corpus consisting of electoral messages on Facebook. The research reveals the ways in which the political actors build claims, representations and positionings about the EU through naturalizing (a) symmetric relations, statuses, and symbolic power hierarchies.