‘The people want …: ’ the populist specter in the Tunisian President’s inaugural speech

Abstract

This paper combines insights from Deictic Space Theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory to analyze the Tunisian President's inaugural speech following his victory in the October 2019 elections. Detailed critical discourse analysis of the deictic exponents and the metaphorical image schemas employed in the text showed a Manichean opposition between the pure/good people (Us) versus the corrupt/evil 'elites' (Them), nostalgia to a pristine revolutionary moment, a pan-Arab discourse which anchors the Israeli-Palestinian conflict close to the local geography and a radical form of populism, which grounds sovereignty within a transcendent theocratic cosmology. It is suggested that the upsurge of populism in Tunisian politics could be explained by the disenchantment with the deficient and rather 'fake' Islamo-nationalist consensus politics, the inappropriate neoliberal policies imposed by fund-raising bodies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) as well as the fragmentation, if not total erosion, of viable public spaces for rational deliberation and decision-making processes as a result of the 'digital era.' ARTICLE HISTORY