Jean-Luc Mélenchon (2012-2017), dalla sinistra al popolo. Linguaggio politico e modelli di leadership in trasformazione

The purpose of this article is to study the recent transformation of the French far-left. The analysis focuses on the five-year period between 2012 and 2017. In both circumstances, the far-left presidential candidate was Jean Luc Mélenchon (JLM) although representing two different political rassemblements. In 2012 the proposed political project was more traditional and conceived within the Front de gauche, that is an electoral federation gathering a large number of parties and political subjects from the French Left minority. In 2017 the France insoumise project becomes much more well-articulated taking on specific populist characteristics. We assume Mélenchon’s leadership model underwent a deep and original transformation from one presidential election to the other. In 2012 his main political interlocutor was the French working class and the citizens of the left, in 2017, instead, the far-left presidential candidate targets all the people, none excluded. This transformation is accomplished by changing the linguistic register adopted by the leader during the two electoral campaigns. For this reason the study examines Mélenchon’s political language through the comparison between 2012 and 2017 presidential election speeches. In order to carry out our investigation, we created a corpus including the above mentioned speeches to be explored synchronically and diachronically by a lexicometric approach. The analysis was performed through Lexico3 and Tropes, two software applications allowing to extract the most relevant information from the corpus and to characterize different parts of it. The results of the research confirm the assumptions, identifying in the JLM of the Front de gauche a leader supporting a traditional project of the new French far-left and in the JLM of France insoumise a populist leader addressing to all the people, thus overcoming the right / left opposition.