"Men in Black" in European Economic Policy. Rhetorical Analysis of the Troika's discursive construction in the Spanish press

Abstract

This paper exposes a rhetorical-argumentative study of the Spanish journalistic discourses about de “Troika” during 2015. This denomination, became popular by the press, has been used to refer to the economic decision group formed by the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. The analysis of the corpus (consisting of texts of the two most read newspapers in Spain) is made within the theoretical and methodological framework provided by the Constructivist Rhetoric. Thus, a study of journalistic discourses has been carried out according to the location, description and interpretation of the rhetorical, tropological and argumentative structures used by journalists. The results obtained shows that there is a discursive construction of the “Troika” in the Spanish press that: 1) identify it as a dark and impersonal entity by the use of different metonymies and synecdoches; 2) describe it metaphorically by a relationship of forces or power; 3) and insert it into a tragic narrative plot.