Modern Spain: New political reality – New political discourse

Abstract

The article aims to specify the typological characteristics of the new, different from the traditional one, Spanish political discourse. This discourse is mainly based on the political strategy of populism leaders of the Podemos political party realize; it represents and models the reality by means of targeted social actions. The research is based on a complex approach that combines discourse and cognitive analyses: this approach allows studying language phenomena from different perspectives that are focused on explaining the discourse cognitive mechanism taking into consideration its linguocultural and sociopolitical aspects. The research material consists of the discursive texts of Podemos leaders such as their public program speeches, TV appearances, published interviews, social media comments. The discourse as the mainframe of the Podemos political communication is understood as a manipulation tool, a special environment of the political subjects’ activities, a communication act and a text as its result. The success of Podemos in 2014–16 is mainly explained by the combination of the discourse and social acts that acquire the new specific meaning thanks to this very discourse. Analyzing discourse not only as an object of the reality that is generated by this reality and is a means of cognizing it but also as a subject of the reality that forms and models the political environment, the authors of the study lay emphasis on the performativity, pragma-tivity and empathy as the typological characteristics of the Spanish left populist discourse. Their discourse based on the triple dichotomy trama/people, enemy/hero, future/past leads to the creation of the post-truth in the collective unconscious of the electorate assigned to shape the public opinion. The typological characteristics of the modern Spanish political discourse, as well as the explanation of the tendencies in Spanish politics originated in the postmodernist and poststructuralist philosophy, bring the opportunity to examine the political discourse of other countries in particular and make a comparative analysis.