ABSTRACT
During the Covid-19 pandemic, people of various political stances gathered throughout Germany to protest against virus-containment restrictions. While criticizing the government’s measures, different protesters, including some on the political left, resorted to conspiracist reasoning. Demokratischer Widerstand (Democratic Resistance), a left-wing populist newspaper founded in April 2020 in Berlin, is a vivid example. Based on its first 25 issues, this discourse-linguistic case study identifies typical argumentation patterns used by the authors of the alternative newspaper during the early pandemic. A comparative topos analysis reveals both differences and similarities in the argumentative strategies of the Demokratischer Widerstand and the established German news magazine Der Spiegel. The authors of the former do not only develop distinctive topoi, but also reframe commonly used ones. They employ recognized schemes of argumentation to dispute widely held beliefs and establish an alternative crisis in the pandemic discourse: a democratic crisis deliberately caused by powerful actors.
