The COVID-19 crisis is remembered as a “historically distinguishable era” (Lundström, 2022: 6), during which the temporality of social activities underwent significant disruption. From the closure of stores to the imposition of curfews, the pandemic reshaped how temporality is constructed in political discourse. The crisis context necessitated a focus on immediacy and urgency while simultaneously constructing visions of the future through hypotheses and promises aimed to be fulfilled. Imaginaries of the future thus articulate expectations, anticipations and plans (Canto-Mila & Seebach, 2024). This study examines how the futures of the crisis and the post-crisis are constructed in governmental discourse during the pandemic. Grounded in Critical Discourse Studies, (more particularly in the Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016)) the research analyzes a corpus of 28 press conferences, delivered between 2020 and 2022. These press conferences constitute the official governmental communication on COVID-19 measures. The findings reveal an evolution in how futures are articulated. At the onset of the crisis, futures are framed as actionable goals through specific or general objectives and conditional scenarios designed to avert undesirable outcomes. Over time, the future transitions into a horizon of projection, encompassing potential post-crisis outcomes and aspirations for “better tomorrows”. However, as the public health situation remains unpredictable, the future becomes increasingly ambiguous, with no assurances, thereby influencing perspectives on (in)action (Mische, 2009). Ultimately, this analysis sheds light on how political discourse navigates the (un)certainties of the crisis, offering insights into the evolving imaginaries of the future during crises.
Denis et al. (Wed,) studied this question.