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Article published In:
(De)legitimising EUrope in times of crisis
Edited by Franco Zappettini and Samuel Bennett
[Journal of Language and Politics 21:2] 2022
► pp. 344–369

Sailing to Ithaka

The transmutation of Greek left-populism in discourses about the European Union

| University of Malta
| Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
| University of Malta

This paper examines the reasoning lines in PM Alexis Tsipras’ political discourse in critical moments of SYRIZA’s tenure as the ruling party in Greece. Adopting a CDS perspective, we zoom in on the patterns that underlie the (de)legitimization of the crisis-ridden EU in three seminal speeches by PM Tsipras during the Greek/EU financial crisis. To this end, we integrate systemic-functional and cognitive linguistic tools with a view to scrutinizing representational meaning, before turning to employ the notions of endoxon and topos/locus as a means of studying the particular argumentative inferences, triggered by the respective discursive representations. Through this lens, we show how the overall argumentation can be seen as supporting the (de-)legitimation of dominant EU austerity perspectives while transforming SYRIZA into a pro-austerity voice.

Keywords: (de-)legitimation, populism, Greek/EU financial crisis, European Union, SYRIZA/Tsipras, critical discourse studies (CDS), argumentation theory
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: (de)legitimating the hegemonic EU perspectives in populist discourses
  • 2.Scrutinizing representational meaning and argumentative inferences in political discourse
  • 3.Athens: Announcing the referendum on the bailout terms proposed by the troika
  • 4.Brussels: Addressing the European Parliament after the referendum
  • 5.Ithaka: Announcing the end of the third MoU
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 January 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.21063.ser
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