The political discourse of Podemos: the construction of an identity

Abstract

This article deals with the study about how the Spanish political party Podemos constructs its identity discursively, and tries to answer the question about whether it can be qualified as a populist in the strict sense. The corpus on which the investigation is based is constituted by the "Political document" of Podemos, available on the party's website. After a description of the linguistic features of that text, with particular emphasis on those of lexical-semantic character (with some relevant quantitative and statistical data), the discursive resources used to build the identity of the party are highlighted. The next step is to compare the characterizing features of Podemos's discourse with those provided by other recent studies on populist parties, to conclude that Podemos represents a political party with a clearly populist profile.