‘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.’

KEYWORDS:

• People
• populism
• spatial cognition
• critical metaphor analysis
• word frequency
• inaugural address
• Tunisia
• Arab Spring

Acknowledgements

In fond memory of Tahar Labassi, friend and colleague. This paper is a sequel to a discussion we had a few days before he passed away.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In 2015, the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize ‘for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011’.

2 Chokri Belaid, the most prominent left-leaning opposition leader, was assassinated on February 6, 2013. On July 25, 2013 another prominent opposition leader Mohamed Brahmi was shot dead in front of his house. The Islamist Ennahda-led coalition government was held responsible for both assassinations.

3 Chebbi opened his poem the Will to Life as follows: ‘If the people want to live, then fate will acquiesce’.

4 KS opposed gender equality in inheritance arguing that the Qur’an is ‘clear and sufficient’. He also reaffirmed his hostility to homosexuality arguing that it was a malicious plan financed by foreign powers to pervert the ‘umma/nation’.

5 Some people call them anarchists. They pay allegiance to a leftist faction called ‘situationnistes’ in French. It rests on local elected ‘communist’ councils and egalitarianism. Ridha Chiheb El-Mekki, nicknamed Lenin for his former university activism, was the most prominent leader of this faction and the closest companion to KS.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fethi Helal

Fethi Helal is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Manouba, Tunisia. His research interests include discourse analysis and contrastive intercultural rhetoric. He is presently researching discourses of nationalism, language ideology and language planning in education. His work has appeared in Discourse studies, Discourse &Communication and Critical Discourse Studies. Address: Campus Universitaire de la Manouba, CP. 2010. Tunisia.