The “Lazy” and the “Frugal”. The Images of Italy and the Netherlands in the Social Media Discourse of the Covid Crisis

This article focuses on the social media image that emerged from Northern and Southern European countries during the Covid-19 crisis, in particular during the Recovery Fund negotiations. To this end, a corpus of 157 tweets by moderate and populist Italian and Dutch political leaders was created during the period between March and August 2020. The theoretical premises are based on imagology (Beller & Leerssen 2007), a sub-discipline that originated in the field of comparative literature which over time has been applied to other domains, such as media studies and translation studies. The preliminary results of this small corpus of tweets confirm that populist rhetoric tends to use national stereotypes to attack opponents.