Anti-Elite Rhetoric in the Facebook Posts of Spanish and Portuguese Populist Parties

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Tiago Lapa, whose focus is on how the Portuguese and Spanish populist parties Chega and Vox construct ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ in their political discourse. Vox’s rise in Spain was party driven by the Catalan independence crisis and the growing European migration crisis; Chega mainly benefitted from internal political turmoil in Portugal.

The present paper examined the Facebook posts from both parties in January to March 2023, drawing on some 240-280 posts from each party. For Vox, these featured (in order of importance) anti-minority (including migrants as well as women, LGBTQ+, and other groups), anti-corruption, anti-separatism, anti-climate change, nationalist, anti-media, and anti-system discourses; nationalist and anti-separatist discourses were often linked, as were anti-corruption and anti-media discourses, and anti-corruption and anti-separatism discourses.

For Chega, the posts featured anti-corruption, anti-minority (targetting migrants and the Roma community, in particular), anti-system, nationalist, and anti-media discourses, with the topic of corruption dominating by far. These mostly stand on their own, although there are some links between anti-system and anti-corruption discourses.

This shows that not all the people are actually part of ‘the people’ – only ‘the good Portuguese’ or ‘the honourable Spanish’ are include; immigrants are not part of these groups, but seen as protected by ‘the elites’ (and the latter include other political actors and the media). Only Vox is also focussed on separatists, environmentalists, and feminists as members of ‘the elite’.