Constructing the Enemy: ‘Us-vs-Them’ discourse in Farage, Le Pen, and Abascal

Abstract

This article investigates the discursive construction of ideological antagonism in the speeches of Nigel Farage (UK), Marine Le Pen (France), and Santiago Abascal (Spain), focusing on how each leader produces and legitimizes polarized “us-versus-them” frameworks. Drawing from Critical Discourse Analysis (van Dijk, 1998; Wodak, 2015), the study examines a small corpus of high-stakes public speeches during electoral or national moments in which the “enemy” is explicitly named–be it immigrants, elites, supranational institutions, or political rivals. The analysis identifies recurring strategies such as the ideological square, negative other-presentation, moral dualism, and discursive delegitimization. Despite distinct national contexts, the findings reveal a shared reliance on populist polarization and exclusionary rhetoric, as well as context-specific variations in how the “other” is racialized, bureaucratized, or historicized. This study contributes to the comparative understanding of European right-wing populism and its linguistic mechanisms of social division.