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Imagining the Peoples of Europe: Populist discourses across the political spectrum
Edited by Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 83] 2019
► pp. 123–147

Chapter 5
The articulation of ‘the people’ in the discourse of Podemos

This chapter focuses on the construction of pueblo ‘people’ and patria ‘homeland’ in the Spanish discourse of Podemos and the party’s relation to la gente ‘the people’ between June 2016 and its second political conference, Vistalegre II (February 2017). The discursive analysis focuses on figures of speech, such as synecdoche and metaphors, followed by a narrative analysis. The data cover the General Secretary of the party, Pablo Iglesias and the head of the branch in Catalonia, Xavier Domènech. We then apply the explanatory logics developed within discourse theory (Glynos and Howarth 2007) to interpret the results of the analysis and we critically reflect on some observed ambiguities in the discourse of Podemos.

Keywords: Podemos, populism, discourse theory, narrative analysis, rhetoric analysis
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Theoretical and methodological framework
  • Analytical Approach
    • Context and data
  • Analysis of the data
    • Podemos’ relationship with the people as a synecdoche
    • Podemos is the people, a popular movement
    • Podemos’ identification with the peoples and nations of Spain
    • The construction of an antagonistic divide from the casta
    • Results of the discursive-rhetoric analysis
  • Narrative plotting
  • Interpretation and discussion
    • 15 M and Podemos: Two radically different forms of populism
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 13 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.83.06mon
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