Intervención del líder de la oposición Josep Borrell en el debate sobre el estado de la nación española de 1998: análisis de un discurso fracasado

Abstract

This paper analyses the failed speech made by Josep Borrell, leader of the major opposition party, in the Spanish Parliament in 1998 (during the annual Debate on the State of the Nation), and shows how this discourse refl ects the complex nature of the various levels of meaning analysts attribute to current-day political speech, through the indexicalisation of a socio-political context of a crisis within a party (the Socialist Party). It also represents the struggle between the governing party and the major opposition group to improve their image before a television audience, and in particular Borrell’s personal struggle to affi rm his leadership before his own party members and others. Combining the methodology of both classical Rhetoric and modern Discourse Analysis, we attempt to determine the reasons for the failure of the aforementioned speech. However, the analysis of its rhetorical structure reveals an apparently well constructed discursive text and the reasons for the discursive diffi - culties lie in a socio-pragmatic error: specifi cally, in the inappropriate adaptation of the various functions of discourse to the communicative circumstances present in the Parliament at the time and in the elements of improvisation (negative meta-discursive comments and gestures directed at part of the audience) employed by Borrell throughout his intervention.