The Nation and the People: An appraisal analysis of populist themes in Justin Trudeau’s speeches

The political figure of Justin Trudeau poses interesting challenges. The son of Pierre Trudeau – possibly the first celebrity politician of contemporary mediatised politics but also an intellectual – he has been at centre stage since his birth and under severe scrutiny since he decided to enter the political arena. By his own admission, he joined his father’s Liberal Party but aimed to find his own political path and identity. While searching for a definition for this charismatic celebrity son, some commentators suggest that he may be reproducing populist themes, in line with the political discourse that has been rapidly gaining ground on a worldwide scale. The aim of this study, therefore, is to understand whether Trudeau reproduces populist core ideas, above all anti-elite or ethnic opposition, or promotes the liberal values of multiculturalism and tolerance, and define what type of national identity and society he brings forth. The concept of populism itself is very controversial, as we shall see below. According to a widely-accepted definition, populism is a phenomenon based on the Manichean idea that society is divided into two opposed groups – the people versus the elites – and politics is an expression of the ‘will of the people’ against corrupt institutions (Mudde, 2004). Since different ideologies may frame populism differently, the ingroup/outgroup division may span from a purely anti-elite attitude to ethnic racialisation, such as regionalism and anti-immigration nationalism (de Cleen, 2017; Taggart, 2017). Approaching populism with reference to Trudeau as the Prime Minister of Canada may take us into unchartered territories, as we come across some potential incongruities. First of all, Trudeau not only belongs to the establishment, but he is the establishment by birth: his entire life and family history are expressions of political and intellectual elites and, accordingly, it is hard to imagine how he could credibly bring forth not only reforms, but a real anti-elite programme. Second, though independence movements have crossed the history of the country many times, Canadian identity was constructed as non-nationalistic and multicultural since its foundation and has always been acknowledged as such by a wide spectrum of political parties (Béland et al, 2017; Moodley and Abram, 2012). To paraphrase Oscar Wilde’s famous quote about America, the multiculturalism of Canada is their oldest nationalism: it has been going on now for over a hundred and fifty years. It is true that in recent times anti-immigration movements have gained ground in Canada like elsewhere, but the multi-racial and multicultural roots of the country do not seem to offer easy breeding ground for uncontested ethnic protectionism and nationalistic discourse, at least on a federal level. Finally, as a young leader with a carefully staged image, Trudeau belongs to the plethora of celebrity politicians (Higgins, 2018; Street, 2001) who have been crowding the political scene for five decades. Though not all celebrity politicians are populist, all populist politicians tend to be highly mediatised celebrities, since the (preferably social) media allow them to keep a constant dialogue with the electorate. Defining Trudeau’s populism on the grounds of his political figure, therefore, may not be a reliable solution. Since Trudeau and his political and cultural environment present several complexities, and mediatised politics and the different forms of populism easily blend into each other, I chose to leave comments on his action to political analysists and focus exclusively on his discursive style, which I believe can be revealing of his political stance. Whereas not all populist leaders use populist discourse (Mudde, 2004), discourse provides the interpretive frame of reality and reproduces ideology. Therefore, a combination of methods that both analyse the discursive style and foreground which semantic fields are associated to the set of ideas that populism brings forth, can foreground implicit values and beliefs. Drawing on James R. Martin and Peter White’s Appraisal Theory (2005), the study presents a qualitative analysis of the attitude that Trudeau expressed in four sample speeches when dealing with three key themes, which were chosen as pivotal to define populist ideology on the grounds of the so-called ideational approach (Mudde, 2017; Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2019): the nation (ethnos), the people (demos) and politics. At the same time, the semantic fields that co-occurred with the idea of nation, people, the speaker’s identity and the Other were annotated in order to foreground what type of ethnos and demos he constructed in discourse. This helped me to define whether Trudeau’s rhetoric was based on oppositional emotions and, consequently, conformed to populist discourse.