Populist metaphorical utterances

Abstract

Following Aslanidis (2016) we conceive populism as a discursive frame that promotes a binary worldview confronting the morally superior people (and the politicians speaking on their behalf) to certain immoral (and, thus, illegitimate) political or economic powers. In this chapter, we provide an explanation of how the populist binary worldview is constructed through the metaphorical use of language. Using Romero and Soria (2016)’s notion of metaphorical ad hoc concept construction, we claim that populist speakers metaphorically present elites from a certain perspective which highlights some of their (negative) aspects and suppresses others (which might be positive). Elites, their attitude towards noble people, their behaviour, or their policies, are metaphorically conceptualised as something else. This conceptualisation allows the speaker to assign certain properties to these entities, their attitudes, etc. which locate them in an unethical position consistent with the populist frame. In addition, we explore if, despite getting their content from the more specific right- or left-wing populist values, there are regularities in the metaphorical ad hoc conceptualisation of their populist worldviews, regardless of whether they are right-wing or left-wing. Our study focuses on debates in the European Parliament (EP) in English and Spanish, and we selected one speaker for each language: Nigel Farage (from UKIP in Britain) and Pablo Iglesias (from Podemos in Spain). They represent right-wing and left-wing populism in Europe at the time, respectively. Our initial quantitative identification of the keywords in each sub-corpus (e.g. people, against) is followed by a more in-depth analysis of the novel metaphors associated with those words. In particular, we analyse a selection of metaphors evidenced in Iglesias’s and Farage’s utterances, where populist oppositions are metaphorically conveyed.