From “water, food, energy” to electoral legitimacy: media discourse and symbolic meaning-making in Romania’s 2024 election crisis

Abstract

This article examines how populist political legitimacy is discursively constructed through semiotic framing in a context of democratic instability. Focusing on Romania’s 2024 presidential crisis, the study analyses how nationalist and anti-establishment meanings are produced, circulated, and recontextualized across digital and traditional media environments. Drawing on semiotic theory and critical discourse approaches, the article explores how recurring symbolic elements, such as sovereignty , moral purity , and elemental resources , operate as indexical signs that connect individual grievances to broader ideological narratives. The analysis combines qualitative discourse analysis of candidate communication, computational analysis of 10,556 news articles, and post-electoral survey data ( N = 572) collected immediately after the first round of voting. The analysis shows how discursive strategies contribute to processes of political legitimation by framing power relations in affective and moral terms rather than procedural or institutional ones. Empirical survey data are used to contextualize how these symbolic repertoires circulated across fragmented media environments and were associated with differentiated patterns of electoral alignment. The findings highlight the central role of media discourse and symbolic framing in shaping political legitimacy, polarization, and interpretive authority within contemporary hybrid media systems, offering insights into the symbolic mechanisms through which legitimacy is negotiated in post-socialist societies.