Post-election Blues: The Communication of the Opposition After the Defeat in April 2022

This chapter presents how the losers of the 2022 elections helped the supporters process the failure emotionally. The public communication by the leading politicians, the friendly media, public intellectuals, and experts is analysed according to the image reparation strategies defined in public relations literature by William Benoit. The results show that the communicators preferred the following strategies: shifting blame, referring to defeasibility, promising corrective action, and expressing mortification. Some actors used the strategy of denial based on separating their own party from the camp as a whole. As during the campaign previously, the fierce criticism against the political right proved to be the most recurrent theme in processing of the defeat.