POLITICAL LEADERS IN DAILY NEWSPAPERS: ANALYSIS OF THE 2016 CROATIAN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS
POLITICAL LEADERS IN DAILY NEWSPAPERS: ANALYSIS OF THE 2016 CROATIAN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyses the daily newspaper reporting on key political leaders of the 2016 parliamentary elections, the first early parliamentary elections in Croatia directly caused by a breakup of the ruling coalition. The introduction to these surprise and short-notice elections, at which preferential voting was practiced for only the second time, was a short election campaign and a change in leadership of the biggest party (HDZ), which triggered the extensive use of personalisation in campaigns run by the biggest parties and their coalitions. This study examines how five leaders of the most prominent political parties were presented in the six most relevant Croatian daily newspapers during the official election campaign. The findings reveal that the leaders of the two biggest parties dominated media coverage, but also that the only new leader, HDZ's Andrej Plenković, had a very favourable treatment in all of the analysed daily newspapers. Results also showed political programmes and private lives of the leaders to be marginal topics within the analysed leaders' media coverage.

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