Ideological Depictions in the 2023 Presidential Election Campaign in Nigeria

Abstract

Electoral campaigns the world over are captured in persuasive communicative strategies to woo the electorate. The intention is to convince the electorate to vote in a particular direction. Since the enthronement of democracy in Nigeria in 1999 till date, politicians have devised various means of winning elections by touching at the core of perceived social problems. There seems to be a paradigm shift in the mode of campaigning in the build-up to the 2023 presidential election in Nigeria. Before this time, there were two dominant political parties in the country: the Peoples’ Democratic Party, PDP, and the All-Progressive Congress, APC. However, the entry of the Labour Party LP presidential candidate into the race has changed the dynamics of the game. The LP candidate has deployed linguistic resources in such a manner that he has endeared himself to the youth who constitute most of the population that cuts across all ethnic groups in the country. The support for the LP candidate keeps growing daily. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to examine the ideological representation of the campaign speeches of the LP candidate and explicate how he has effectively managed the resources of language to get himself endeared to the teeming youthful voting population. Data for the study were elicited from newspaper reports of the speeches and YouTube.