Of Politics and the Pandemic: Communicating Weak Governance and Pandemic Response Through Multimodal Metaphors and Metonymies in Philippine Editorial Cartoons

In the Philippines, the COVID-19 pandemic was not just a medical crisis but also a political one. It exposed “the weaknesses of state institutions, the exploitation of disaster for vested interests, and imbalanced central-local relations” (Calimbahin & Agojo, 2023, p. 42). Using critical metaphor analysis, I therefore investigate how this sentiment is instantiated through PHILIPPINE GOVERNMENT metaphors and metonymies in Philippine Daily Inquirer editorial cartoons. I ascertain how the interaction between metaphors and metonymies brings about the critical standpoint of the cartoon, which comments on the Philippine government and its pandemic response; it, for example, was commonly metaphorized in a negative light through the conceptual metonymy TURTLE FOR SLOWNESS, highlighting its sluggish and slow pandemic response. I conclude that analyzing the underlying conceptual metaphor-metonymy system used in an editorial cartoon not only surfaces the meaning-making process behind their creation, but also the ideologies and sentiments that inform them.