The Formation of the Political Image of Mariano Rajoy and Carles Puigdemont in Spanish Media

The concept of a political leader and construction of his image is inextricably linked with the political system of the state. In recent years the division of political leaders has been divided into two blocks: conservative and innovative. Due to this, some changes take place for the mechanism of images' modeling in two types of the leader. Despite the active development of this phenomenon in world politics, the researchers focus on identifying mechanisms of representation during election campaigns. This study can be the key to understanding the emergence, ways of forming and competitiveness of images of a new and old politics. The main attention is given to the relationship between the media environment and the representation of images. The work provides an in-depth study of Spanish and Catalan online media in the context of the analysis of the transmission of the image of the Prime Minister of Spain Mariano Rajoy and the ex-head of Catalonia Carles Puigdemont. The aim of this research is to study the specifics and peculiarities of the formation of two political leaders' images in the media space of Spain. The first chapter consists of two paragraphs. The first one examines fundamental approaches to the study of the concept of a political image. The second paragraph analyzes the ways of forming of this image in Spain, taking into account historical and socio-economic factors on the political processes in the country. The second chapter is devoted to exploration of the ways to represent the image of two political leaders through the use of rhetoric in the country's leading media. The conclusions of this research allow to argue that bipolar political environment within one state inevitably leads to a transformation of the image component of each of the political leaders in the media sphere.