Welcome to the carnival? Podemos, populism and Bakhtin’s carnivalesque

Abstract:

The paper examines the political discourse of the Spanish political party Podemos through the lens of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. Although it was originally used in literary analysis, the carnivalesque is a useful metaphor in politics, in particular for understanding political challenges to the dominant authority.

Thus, while the paper concurs that the discourse of Podemos exhibits features of populism, it argues that the carnivalesque can provide a more thorough understanding of the party’s discourse, including its inversions of hierarchies, carnivalesque attacks on the dominant political elite, its emphasis on the party’s liminality, and its focus on providing a political space for ‘all the people’.