Portuguese Electoral Debate: Presidentialization and Linguistic Mitigation Strategies in Situations of Political Confrontation

Abstract

In a context of increasing presidentialization of legislative election campaigns, I aim to study mitigation as a feature of the Portuguese electoral political debate, a genre of political discourse marked by the intersection with the television media discourse. It is a discursive genre of confrontation between participants-adversaries, seeking for the adhesion of voters by the proposals that they present and also, if not mainly, by the discredit of the political opponent. However, confrontation is not absolute, as the interlocutors must guarantee basic dimensions of political communication, ensuring by the construction, negotiation and co-management of the interpersonal relationship the preservation of a positive individual image in relation to the electorate. I hypothesize that, in this process, linguistic mitigation constitutes a nuclear strategy, carried out in each moment of the debate according to different linguistic-discursive mechanisms. The electoral debate here analysed was held in May 2011 in RTP between Pedro Passos Coelho, leader of the Social Democratic Party, and future prime minister, and José Sócrates, of the Socialist Party, prime minister in office, at the time.