The Ethos of the Spokesperson: A Populist Attempt to Exploit Empathic Connections

Populism is a “thin ideology” characterized by a prominence of self and emotional expression over argumentation. In this respect, populist politicians are most likely to project an image of themselves as “being close to” or even “being part of” the people, in order to establish a sort of empathic connection with the potential voters and present themselves as the “spokespersons” of the people. The analysis of a bilingual corpus built from Farage’s and Le Pen’s tweets has enlightened the presence of several discursive markers that contribute to create this connection on a micro-level (deictic expressions) as well as on a macro-level, in terms of discursive structures (storytelling and free indirect speech).