From personalism to political antagonism in contemporary Spain: the discursive configuration of Santiago Abascal’s populism.

Abstract

Personalism and political antagonism are two features frequently associated with populist discourse. However, not all representative political speakers of this type of discourse use the same strategies to reflect these features in their utterances and to establish a clear relationship between the two. For this reason, this paper aims to analyze a corpus of speeches delivered between 2018 and 2020 by Santiago Abascal that makes the identification of his figure as a populist speaker possible. Fundamentally based on the descriptive works on populism that Patrick Charaudeau has carried out from a Discourse Analysis perspective, the study of the discursive strategies used by Santiago Abascal shows how, through a skillful use of grammatical and lexical structures to designate the “We/Us” and the “They/Them” of the dichotomized political field, he creates a kind of non-explicit personalism that leads to the radical antagonism that characterizes populism as a discursive phenomenon.