Popular legitimacy in populist rhetoric The cases of the “Parti Populaire”(PP) and the “Parti du Travail de Belgique” (PTB)

While populism remains considered as threatening democracy, several populist leaders claim to be populist. According to them, it is not negative because they wish to mobilize the people in order to let them speak and defend their right to self-determination. Yet, a confusion often characterizes the notion of the people and, more generally, the notion of “popular legitimacy”. The notion of the people is at the heart of the legitimization process of populist parties – which are increasingly gaining access to power since two decades. It is thus important to better understand how populist parties mobilize the notion of “the people” in their rhetoric. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, it aims at quantitatively apprehending the position of the people in their discourse. Second, it aims at qualitatively understanding how the people is defined, what are its characteristics and how it can be considered (an inclusive vs an exclusive use of populism, e.g.). Two populist parties – a radical right populist party and a radical left populist party – are compared for the purpose of this research and a discursive analysis is conducted, based on a corpus comprised of political programmes and oral communications coming from their key representatives. The findings suggest that both radical right and radical left populist parties share a common core understanding of the people but it also differs to some extent, for instance by the words they use to name the people and by the values they use to unify the people