If there is something that we have learned as an international community during the past few (and not only) years is that in today's interconnected world, a crisis is never ‘far away’ from us. From the recent paradigms of the international financial crisis in 2008 and its aftermath to the pandemic of COVID-19 and the war between Russia and Ukraine, we have all experienced the effects of a crisis in different contexts and depths.

Research on crisis and crisis communication involves many models and definitions, but with the common denominator that a crisis is a major occurrence with a potentially negative outcome (Coombs 2015). A basic condition of a crisis is a non-specific event, which has a strong effect on the entire social tissue and creates feelings of uncertainty (Seeger 1998). In this environment, political communication is expected to highlight clear leadership with the aim of alleviating the symptoms of this crisis and strengthening the structures so that the next crisis will have milder effects. Along with the term ‘crisis’, that is both experientially and scholarly defined, the term ‘political communication’ has been widely researched and sometimes vaguely defined. For example, Pye (1993: 422) follows a social-constructivist definition by arguing that political communication is ‘the flow of messages and information that gives structure and meaning to the political process’. In addition, Blumler (2014: 39) highlights the importance of the media organisations suggesting that political and media organisations ‘show a horizontal interaction while on a vertical axis, they separately and jointly engage in disseminating and processing information and ideas to and from the mass citizenry’. Other scholars (Jamieson and Kenski 2014; Powell and Cowart 2003) with a wider approach define political communication as a communicative activity of citizens, individual political figures, public institutions, media and social movements. Perloff (2018: 12) defines political communication as a ‘complex, communicative activity in which language and symbols, employed by leaders, media, citizens and citizen groups, exert a multitude of effects on individuals and society, as well as on outcomes that bear on the public policy of a nation, state or community’, highlighting the notion of political leadership.

At this point, Kahn (2020) identifies two models of leadership, namely the Political Prominence Model, where the political protagonist receives advice from experts but still reserves the decision-making process and the Expert Appointee Prominence Model, where the politician focuses on delegation of the decisionmaking process.