The new anthology The New Challenges of Populist Discourses in Romance Speaking Countries , edited by Malin Roitman et al., examines election campaigns in Spain, France, Italy and Brazil with an aim to identify, explore and compare expressions of populism.
The past decades have seen a rise in populist discourse and populist candidates have been successful in election campaigns around the world. The use of social media has often played a significant role and has created a way for populist and nationalist candidates to engage directly with “the people”, side-stepping the establishment, which is often used as a scapegoat for past political failures. This book includes studies from different academic disciplines such as discourse analysis, cultural and media studies.
The first part contains an analysis of the political program of former Brazilian president Bolsonaro and how it promoted certain values such as private property as the supreme moral good, with human rights and the environment being pushed back. The second part of the book studies the the representation and the conceptualization of immigration in far-right political discourse in France. For example by an analysis of Marine Le Pen’s speeches and a comparison of her rhetorical strategies to those used by Emmanuel Macron.
The third part is focused on Italy and the use of polarizing and provoking discourse. Social media posts using an aggressive language and an appeal to emotion rather than rationality are highlighted as being successful in the decades since the collapse of the former political party system in the early 1990’s. The fourth part of the book contains a comparison of the recent electoral programs of the Spanish political parties Podemos and Vox and its discourses including references to traditional old-fashioned values as well as a “us-them” polarization with a radical process of “othering” being efficient in social media.
Stockholm Studies in Romance Languages
Stockholm Studies in Romance Languages (SSIRL) (ISSN 2002-0724) is a peer-reviewed series of monographs and edited volumes published by Stockholm University Press. SSIRL strives to provide a broad forum for research on Romance Languages of all periods, including both linguistics and literature.
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