La construcción de la identidad de Vox en el discurso de Santiago Abascal

Abstract

The Spanish political party Vox belongs to the so-called Populist Radical Right (PRR) (Mudde, 2007; Mudde 2019; Rama et al., 2021); since they became part of the Spanish Congress in 2019, the speech of its leaders has been the subject of study in various disciplines. Using a corpus of oral texts delivered by its president, Santiago Abascal, as a starting point, this study aims to show the way in which the political leader discursively constructs the identity of his party and, by extension, that of his entire in-group political ideology. This work is framed in the conception of populism as a discursive phenomenon (cf. especially Laclau, 2005; Charaudeau, 2009, 2019; Aslanidis, 2016; Stavrakakis, 2017, Connett, 2021) and it is based on the methods of CorpusAssisted Discourse Studies (CADS) in order to show, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the linguistic procedures through which Abascal defines the nature of his party. Our analysis reveals that the identity of Vox, as characterized by Abascal in the speeches within the corpus, not only adjusts to the ideological and content features of the PRR, but also to the essential forms of populist discourse in general.