Election interviews in the spanish political campaign of 1996 : strategies for building discursive credibility

Abstract

In this paper, the author presents the analysis and interpretation of several interviews with the leaders of the three major Spanish political parties during the election campaign in March 1996. The analysis of those interviews examines the rhetorical and discursive practices constructed by those politicians; each of which represents a distinct symbolic world that claims to be concerned with resolving the problems of citizens. However, the main function of each symbolic world is, in fact, to indexicalize the interests of their respective party: a) Anguita's words (IU) are intented to achieve credibiliy in order to obtain new leftist voters; otherwise, his party runs the risk of losing a significant amount of votes; b) Aznar ( PP) is concerned with demonstrating that his party is no longer the traditional right , but a modern moderate party as his purpose is to attract votes from undecided citizens; and c) González's main purpose (PSOE) is to put forward evidence that shows how the PP party is still connected to a historically darker past that stunted the countries development on the road to modernization in order to downplay the difficult situation his party currently finds itself in, which is, in fact, the main reason for the rise of the conservative right-wing party in Spain after the restoration of democracy. Consequently, this analysis demonstrates how these three politicians build symbolic contructs that give priority to their particular interests above citizens' real problems. In other words, although these problems are alluded to , they are discursively and rhetorically subordinated to partisan aims.