Abstract

On April, 17th 2018, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in the Plenary of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, appealed to the “renaissance of European sovereignty”. The article analyzes the functions attributed to the preferred social network for debate and political discussion, Twitter, focusing essentially on: the distribution of information, the impact of the social network on the modification of the public agenda, the personalization of the transmission of political discourses in social networks, as well as new habits of political consumption specifically, in the context of Twitter. The results show that: 1) journalists have a key role in the descriptive phase towards national publics but a less salient one in the emerging transnational sphere where political actors target their own publics directly; 2) EU institutions failed to try to set the agenda setting through hashtags without success; 3) Macron is a transnational political actor capable of communicating through fragmented public spaces; 4) The content of the messages passes very quickly from a descriptive to a framing approach.

Abstract

International power structures present a pattern of transition, where the United States is no longer able to consolidate its power globally. The slogans of Donald Trump: “Make America great again” or “America first” are an example of the media interest of the American president in that his electors think that it’s possible to gain the lost hegemony. This article examines Donald Trump’s bilateral encounters with politicians Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Shinzō Abe, Theresa May, Justin Trudeau, Giuseppe Conte, and Jean-Claude Juncker. Meetings marked by extravagant greetings and politically out of place behaviors that seem more like a reality show than a bilateral encounter between political leaders. Using data results from Google Trends platform, we study the resonance of the meetings between Donald Trump and the heads of state of the G7 countries to examine the variations in Trump’s popularity after these meetings.