I want to be a prime minister, or what linguistic choice can do for campaigning politicians

The aim of this article is to analyse the strategies that politicians can use in order to defeat their political adversaries. To this end, I have put some ideas developed by discourse analysts to the test, taping some of the speeches, interviews and debates of the 2000 electoral campaign in Andalusia (Spain), scrutinizing the four main candidates’ most significant discursive devices and paying special attention to the way they interact with each other, their interviewers and the audience in their political meetings. In this way, I have tried to see whether their different political persuasions may produce a characteristically different distinctive linguistic style, whether gender might influence their choice of discourse structures, and the extent to which the winning candidate’s linguistic idiosyncrasies might have contributed to his success.