President Gustavo Petro’s calls for social mobilization as discursive risk: analyzing YouTube automatic transcripts

1 Introduction

The objective of this article is to analyze the discursive strategies employed by Colombian President Gustavo Petro when he promotes social mobilization from the state sphere. This occurs within the context of his government administration, amid social conflict and political polarization. Colombia experienced a marked transition with a shift toward the left in June 2022, when Gustavo Petro was elected president, emerging as a figure who challenged the historical dominance of conservative elites (Ronderos, 2024).

These elections did not constitute an isolated case but rather form part of a new left-wing wave in a scenario where radical politics draws upon grassroots social movements (Webber, 2022). Petro's rise occurs during periods of social conflict and economic inequality, and within a context of social protests in which citizens demanded drastic changes to the political structures that have traditionally governed the country (Hernández-Vidal and Gualdrón-Ramírez, 2023), structures to which citizens attribute corruption cases and systemic failures in the implementation of critical policies such as the peace agreement. This framework is essential for understanding how Petro rose to power and reveals the early signs of his strategies for mobilizing citizens, particularly by aligning himself with their struggles and framing them as a confrontation between ‘the people’ and Colombian ‘elites’.

Social media served as a crucial driver of this dynamic, as the government's social media engagement strategies transform the nature of political communication by enabling more direct and unfiltered interactions with citizens (Wukich, 2021). Unlike their predecessors, who maintained a close relationship between the press and the state, digital platforms have become essential spaces for political participation (Postill, 2020).

Gustavo Petro leverages social media to reach a wider audience. His strategic use marks a new era of political communication in Colombia within a global context where young people's political participation occurs primarily through social media (Khubisa, 2021). He capitalizes on this juncture and demographic segment, making them feel like active participants in a broader socio-political struggle, a clear indication of populist attitudes (Ardag et al., 2020) that seek to mobilize citizens against elites while highlighting national values and putting the people first (Wajner, 2021). He successfully captured the frustrations and aspirations of low-income populations who felt marginalized by the Colombian political system (Kessler et al., 2024). This aligns with the strategies of other populist leaders in the region, who in their presentation allude to the defense of the people against corrupt elites.

Several authors describe Gustavo Petro as a populist leader. For example, Rivera Magos and González Pureco (2024) analyzed his social media communications and included him a list of 5 populist Latin American presidents, alongside Alberto Fernández (Argentina), Luis Arce (Bolivia), Nayib Bukele (El Salvador), and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Mexico). Their study finds a “constant and significant presence of populism in his communication, characterized by references to the virtuous people and the general will, as well as the recurrent use of the dichotomy between people and elite” (Rivera Magos and González Pureco, 2024: 87). In the same manner, Pastrana Buelvas and Vera (2025) examine Petro's foreign policy discourse through the lens of populism, noting that his populist leadership tone fosters an anti-elitist, anti-technical, and conflictual attitude in foreign relations.

The electoral support for Petro has also been analyzed through the framework of populism. The shift in Colombia's political landscape after the Peace Accord opened space for the expression of social discontent, which materialized as a generalized discontent against the elites and a feeling of ‘tilted playing field’ that contributed to electoral support for an “anti-system” force in the 2022 election (Kessler et al., 2024). This aligns with the populist logic of constructing the people against the elites. Furthermore, a comparative study of rhetorical strategies used by Javier Milei and Gustavo Petro concludes that, despite their ideological differences, these leaders employ rhetorical strategies centered around populist and anti-establishment sentiments in order to mobilize their electoral bases (Bedoya Lopera et al., 2025).

Within the broader Latin American context, populists in power, from Hugo Chávez to Donald Trump, waged war against the media, made rivals into existential enemies, and attempted to concentrate power in the hands of the president (De la Torre and Srisa-nga, 2021). Petro's discursive strategies, as analyzed in this study, reflect these broader regional patterns of populist communication while adapting to the specific Colombian context of political polarization.

2 Literature review

2.1 Populism within Laclau’s framework

To establish a clear conceptual foundation, this study adopts Laclau's discourse-theoretical approach, which defines populism as a mode of constructing the political through the articulation of social demands into a unified popular identity (Laclau, 2007). Within this framework, populism operates through the discursive construction of “the people” as a collective subject opposed to an “elite” or “establishment.” This process relies on the logic of equivalence, where diverse demands are articulated as equivalent in their opposition to a common adversary, and on the production of empty signifiers that give meaning to popular identity (Laclau, 2007, 2010). This approach, developed further by Mouffe (2011, 2022), emphasizes the role of affects and passions in political identification, viewing the construction of “the people” as a contingent and hegemonic process rather than an expression of pre-existing identities.

The adoption of Laclau's framework is situated against two prominent alternatives. The first, the ideational approach, defines populism as a thin-centered ideology that divides society into two antagonistic groups: “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite” (Mudde, 2004; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). While influential, this approach treats populism as a fixed set of beliefs, limiting its capacity to capture the dynamic processes through which populist identities are constructed. The second, the stylistic or performative approach, conceptualizes populism as a political style characterized by the performance of crisis and the embodiment of the leader as the incarnation of “the people” (Moffitt, 2016; Ostiguy, 2017). While valuable, this framework places greater emphasis on performative dimensions than on the discursive construction of collective identities, which is central to this study's textual analysis.

Laclau's approach is well suited to this study for three reasons. First, it centers on the discursive processes through which “the people” and “the elite” are constructed, aligning with the methodological focus on presidential speeches and YouTube transcripts. Second, it treats populism as a logic of articulation identifiable regardless of ideological orientation, allowing analysis of left-wing populism without reducing it to predetermined ideological features. Third, it explicitly theorizes social mobilization as a mechanism through which popular identities are constituted, making it directly relevant to a study focused on calls for social mobilization (Laclau, 2007; Schmidtke, 2021).

Additionally, the populist-mobilization approach developed by Aslanidis (2025) is employed due to the context of Petro's discourses. Aslanidis argues that populism is a discursively constructed collective action frame that emerges from grassroots social movements, integrating Laclauian discourse analysis with collective action frame theory and offering a framework that bridges institutional and non-institutional dimensions of populism. This approach emphasizes the role of discourse in constructing collective identities and mobilizing citizens for collective action.

Within the Laclauian and Mouffean tradition, the construction of “the people” and the appeal to social mobilization are not necessarily read as anti-democratic. Indeed, Mouffe (2022) has argued that left populism can serve as a democratizing force by articulating the demands of marginalized sectors and challenging the neoliberal consensus. This study does not assume that populist discourse is inherently de-democratizing. Rather, it proposes that in the specific Colombian context, marked by historical violence, and deep political polarization, the discursive patterns identified in Petro's speeches constitute a risk to democratic stability. This hypothesis is explored through the analysis of the corpus, rather than presupposed as a foregone conclusion.

Laclau (2010) also takes into account that populism is simply a way of constructing the political, and Latin America provides examples such as populist dictatorships and democracies that convene referendums and popular participation (Retamozo, 2017). It is based on non-ideological coalitions that benefit from a unifying appeal to the people, and it challenges liberal logics according to which citizenship is always reduced to individuals, power is only contemplated as appropriately institutionalized, problems are viewed in isolation from one another, and democratic popular sovereignty is reduced to voting and representation. It challenges each of these assertions insofar as it proposes ‘the people’ in the place of the citizen or voter; a front of 'struggle’ between the people and elites, rather than viewing social problems in isolation; a ‘populist rupture’ (Schmidtke, 2021), instead of leaving problems in the hands of institutions; and a counter-hegemonic struggle for a different order, rather than sustaining a popular sovereignty identified with parliamentary democracy (Biglieri and Cadahia, 2021).

In “On Populist Reason”, Laclau (2010: 13–14) defines the two universally present features of populism: the appeal to the people and anti-elitism. These are two characteristics of President Gustavo Petro: the call to convene the people and the reiteration of anti-elitism in Colombia.

This idea is complemented by Mouffe (2023) in The Power of Affects in Politics, where she asks: ‘How are forms of collective identification created, and what role do affects/passions play in this process?’ Petro adapts his rhetoric to the context (Gennaro, Lecce and Morelli, 2021) and employs emotional appeals (Aytaç, Çarkoğlu and Elçi, 2025) when addressing the Colombian public, considering the emotional intensity of his political speeches depending on his audiences, whether at international events, presidential addresses on camera, or on his social media accounts.

The populist politician is flexible regarding society's specific concerns (Roch, 2024) and asserts that only he represents the people, the populace. Müller (2016: 4) cites Erdogan as an example when he states: ‘We are the people, who are you?’ Populists justify their conduct by claiming that they alone represent the people, which allows them to openly manifest their practices (Müller, 2016), even on YouTube, a platform that enables them to transmit and reproduce these practices in a charismatic and effective manner (Finlayson, 2022).

This network serves as a forum for debate and protest, a function that Petro exploits to call for collective action (Way, 2015). Notably, in this digital scenario, the strategy of political linkage (Kitschelt, 2000) is subverted by being employed outside the electoral context, primarily maintaining charismatic and media-based strategies. Petro's strategies reflect the adaptability afforded by the digital context, allowing him to adapt and present his messages as the legitimate representative of the will of the Colombian people (De la Torre and Mazzoleni, 2019).

For Neiman (2024), Schmitt's concept of ‘enemy’ can be understood as ‘adversary’, not necessarily one who must be destroyed. According to Neiman, Mouffe is correct that much of democratic consensus actually masks apathy; for a society to function well, it needs confrontation and debate (Neiman, 2024: 105). Confrontation and debate are inherent to Petro's political trajectory, characterized by confrontations with the press, disinformation, slander, insults, and an excessive use of X (formerly Twitter) characterized by a direct, polemical, confrontational tone where emotions foster polarization within digital social networks.

2.2 The discursive risk of populism

In the 21st century, a multiplicity of elements can be observed that carry a discursive risk against the political society in several Latin American countries in a context where governments generate political regressions with respect to democracy (Barrenechea and Vergara, 2024; Gelabert, 2019; Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018; Rojas, 2025). This is divided into categories such as ‘the suppression of the separation of powers, populist leaderships, authoritarian practices, elimination of institutions and their autonomy, destruction of checks and balances, among others’ (Rojas, 2025: 56).

The interpretation of Petro's discourse as a discursive risk requires making explicit the conception of democracy against which criticism of institutions, calls to protest, appeals to popular sovereignty, and the mobilization of non-voters are read as potential signs of erosion rather than as ordinary democratic participation. The present study adopts a conception of pluralist democracy, understood as a political system characterized by the existence of multiple centers of power, institutional checks and balances, respect for civil liberties, and the recognition of legitimate political opposition (Dahl, 1989; Held, 2006). In this framework, democratic politics is not merely about majority rule but about the institutionalization of contestation and inclusion, where different political actors can compete for power through established channels and where no single actor or group can claim to embody the totality of “the people” (Mouffe, 2011).

From this perspective, certain discursive practices require careful scrutiny. Criticism of institutions, for example, is a legitimate and indeed essential part of democratic politics. However, when criticism systematically delegitimizes the very existence of independent institutions as obstacles to the “will of the people,” it moves beyond ordinary political contestation into what Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) identify as a mechanism of democratic erosion. Similarly, calls to protest and appeals to popular sovereignty are fundamental democratic rights. However, when street mobilization is framed as the only authentic expression of popular will, it may bypass representative channels and weaken the institutional fabric of democracy. The mobilization of non-voters, while potentially expanding political participation, also carries risks when framed as a means to circumvent existing democratic procedures rather than to strengthen them through institutional engagement. As Vergara (2023) argues, the culture of personalistic politics that accompanies such appeals increases polarization and reduces cooperation among political actors, making democratic governance more fragile.

It is important to acknowledge that within the Laclauian and Mouffean tradition, the construction of “the people” and the appeal to social mobilization are not necessarily read as anti-democratic or as risks to democracy. Indeed, Laclau (2007) argued that populism is a democratic logic that can articulate the demands of marginalized sectors and challenge exclusionary institutional orders. Mouffe (2022) has further developed this perspective, contending that left populism can serve as a democratizing force by challenging the neoliberal consensus and constructing a “people” capable of radical democratic transformation. From this alternative reading, Petro's appeals to “constituent power” and his calls for social mobilization could be interpreted as efforts to deepen democracy by including historically excluded sectors and challenging entrenched elite interests.

The present study does not dismiss this alternative interpretation. Rather, it proposes that in the specific Colombian context, the same discursive patterns may carry different meanings and implications. Colombia is a country marked by historical violence, deep political polarization, and a legacy of state capture by economic and political elites (Barrenechea and Vergara, 2024; Rojas, 2025). In this context, the systematic framing of institutional actors as enemies of the people and the appeal to direct popular mobilization as the only authentic expression of sovereignty may not function as democratic deepening but as a discursive risk that could weaken the institutional foundations necessary for pluralist democracy to function. The hypothesis explored is that in such a context, the populist logic of constructing “the people” against “the elites” may generate polarization and institutional erosion, even when articulated from a left-wing perspective that claims democratic deepening as its objective.

The former can even be associated with a type of state capture (Crabtree and Durand, 2017) not only by economic elites but also by political and social actors who renounce public management from the perspective of the common interest. Such practices of power relate to the influence of elites over the public policy cycle and state bodies in favor of their interests and to the detriment of the general interest, thereby exacerbating inequality and undermining the proper functioning of democracy (Cortés and Itriago, 2018).

2.3 A context of de-democratization

The crisis of democracy is understood from the system of capture of public positions, which includes the appointment of relatives to state positions, the discretionary use of public management means for private ends, the uncontrolled reorganization of budgets, and the restriction of public information (Merino, 2013). This process of ‘de-democratization’ contributes to the weakening, restriction, and elimination of the political and institutional conditions that guarantee the full exercise of democracy (Del Tronco and Monsiváis-Carrillo, 2020). In this manner, populism has the capability to erode democracy (Barrenechea and Vergara, 2024) insofar as the management of public affairs renounces the construction of a pluralist democracy project (Mouffe, 1999), which commits to creating real possibilities for participation in decision-making.

Individuals and political parties use democratic mechanisms against democratic systems themselves (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018); elected leaders, ministers, or generals who subvert the process that brought them to power. This fuels the culture of personalistic politics, increasing the risks of polarization and cooperation among political actors (Vergara, 2023), and paves the way for political practices that facilitate the establishment of autocratic regimes, which accentuate the deterioration of qualities associated with democratic governance (Del Tronco and Monsiváis-Carrillo, 2020).

Latin American experience shows how the growing distance between political parties and citizens generates discontent and abrupt declines in trust in representative institutions, favoring the emergence of populist leaderships. Given this scenario, this article aims to analyze the presidential addresses issued by President Gustavo Petro during 2024 in which he calls for social mobilization.

The authors propose the following qualitative hypothesis, which guides the analysis and is explored through the corpus: Petro's populist discourse may constitute a discursive risk to democratic stability insofar as it delegitimizes institutional actors, bypasses representative channels, and/or personalizes political authority. This hypothesis is open to disconfirmation and is tested against the data by examining whether the discursive patterns identified in the speeches correspond to the hypothesized risk mechanisms. Rather than asserting a causal relationship between discourse and institutional outcomes, the study explores whether the identified patterns are consistent with the hypothesis of discursive risk in the Colombian context marked by violence and polarization.

3 Materials and methods

This research employs a mixed-methods approach with emphasis on qualitative analysis (Creswell, Fetters and Ivankova, 2004). Generative AI Tools were employed mainly to filter quantitative data and assist in sample selection. It is situated within the field of political discourse analysis, specifically focusing on calls for social mobilization made by President Gustavo Petro. Political discourse is analyzed under the precepts of discourse analysis (Gee, 2014; Van Dijk, 1998), taking into account the political context (Rebollo-Bueno, 2023). The units of analysis are limited to automatic transcripts of Petro's official speeches; therefore, the sampling does not include paraverbal or nonverbal dimensions nor adjustments to or reactions from audiences—whether particular or universal (Aikin, 2008)—when selecting the speeches.

The universe consisted of 601 videos published on the official YouTube channel of the Presidency of Colombia (@infopresidencia) between December 2023 and December 2024. A web crawling process was conducted using the Apify platform and the YouTube Scraper API module to extract the complete list of videos. This process was double-verified using a Python notebook with the YouTube Data API v3 library, from which a list of videos was extracted in CSV format. Subsequently, the Python library ‘YouTubeTranscriptAPI’ was employed to download the automatic transcripts of each video in ‘.txt’ format.

Following text analytics and natural language processing (NLP) practices (Katre, 2019a; 2019b; Rao and McMahan, 2019; Sarkar, 2016), the transcripts were processed to remove stopwords, perform tokenization (dividing text into individual sentences), and conduct part-of-speech tagging to identify keywords and their contexts. These processes were executed using the Spanish-NLP library (Ortiz-Fuentes, 2022) and PyTorch within Python (.ipynb) notebooks.

The Llama 3 AI model was executed locally to examine the collected texts. This automated model analyzed each text file and verified the central criteria, whether (1) the video contained a speech by President Gustavo Petro and (2) whether there was any direct or indirect call for social mobilization. The following is the final prompt applied to every transcript (.txt file): The previous instructions helped the model with accuracy, specifically with points 2 and 3, since the model could hallucinate a response that was not included in the text file. For reference, NLP models achieve this by identifying keywords, in this case those were ‘movilización’, ‘protesta’, ‘pueblo’, ‘calle’, and ‘marchar’ [mobilization, protest, people, streets, protest]. By demanding explicit fragments of the text file and forcing the model to explain why the speech alluded to social mobilization the authors were able to detect nineteen (19) coincidences, and after manual verification, the final sample was reduced to thirteen (13) speeches spanning from December 1, 2023, to December 31, 2024, totaling 5.7 h of video.

• Analyze this text. It is a YouTube automatic transcript from the channel @infopresidencia (Colombia's presidency) that has been normalized for easier analysis.
• Respond in a concise, academic manner.

Discourse analysis was employed on the collected texts in Spanish (see Supplementary Appendix A), focusing on each automatic transcript as a unit of analysis. Although the authors watched the associated speeches, the main categories that guided the analysis were: Coding was conducted inductively by the three authors. An initial reliability test was performed on three speeches, which were independently coded by each author. The results were compared and discussed to calibrate the application of categories and ensure consistency in interpretation. Following this calibration, the remaining ten speeches were coded by the authors, with periodic cross-verification to maintain analytical coherence.

• Direct or indirect speech (Perry, 2013): Identifying when the president explicitly or implicitly invited the population to mobilize, including against the government he presides over.
• Metaphors and discursive strategies (Otieno, Owino and Attyang, 2016): Examining the use of metaphors or comparisons with abstract concepts (such as nature, love, progress) to mobilize the masses.
• Political linkage strategies (Kitschelt, 2000): Classifying types of linkage as programmatic, clientelistic, charismatic, organizational, or media-based.
• Level of populism (Poblete, 2015): Assessing the extent to which discourse revolved around the unprotected or marginalized, and whether the speaker included themselves as part of ‘we, the people’.

For each speech, the presence or absence of each category was first identified. Exact textual matches corresponding to each category were then extracted and compiled. Finally, each author developed analytical observations according to their proposed category of specialization. The thirteen speeches were initially filtered using the Llama LLM and subsequently subjected to manual analysis using rubrics developed in Microsoft Word. Given that the sampling was comprised exclusively of automatic YouTube transcripts in which the president explicitly or implicitly mentioned social mobilization, saturation criteria were not applicable; the sample constitutes the total population of speeches meeting the inclusion criteria within the specified timeframe. Within this framework, the results are not a generalization of all government communications nor Petro's entire political discourse as a whole, but in a specific pattern: how he calls for social mobilization in his official speeches.

4 Results

Thematic areas identified include the idea of an oligarchic dictatorship, a ’soft coup d'état’, the role of the people in the streets, and allusions to peace, climate change, and artificial intelligence. Additionally, patterns of conflict with the national public sphere, the national press, journalists, and Colombian media outlets were evident, as seen in Table 1.

Table 1. Speeches call for a social mobilization.

In addition to presenting the achievements of his government, these speeches are oriented toward presenting the president as a leader who directly addresses the people, emphasizing his closeness and commitment to popular causes, and positioning citizens as central protagonists of political and social change (D5, D6, D7). Within this framework, he minimizes the role of political parties and appeals to the idea of a direct bond between the leader and the people, articulated around the defense of social rights, agrarian reform, and the democratization of power (D7, D10). The insistence on formulas such as the ‘popular mandate’, the ‘constituent power’ of the people, or the juxtaposition between ‘oligarchy’ and ‘people’ consolidates a narrative of direct representation, wherein the president presents himself as the legitimate spokesperson for citizens against economic and media elites (D5, D7).

The insistence on formulas such as ‘popular mandate’, ‘the people as constituent power’, or the juxtaposition between ‘oligarchy’ and ‘people’ consolidates a narrative of direct representation, wherein the president presents himself as the legitimate spokesperson for citizens against economic media elites (D6, D7). For example, he seeks to highlight his commitment and closeness to citizens: ‘As president, I am here, facing you, to tell you that this struggle is also my struggle’ (D6).

In this sense, his figure is configured as the axis of social mobilization and collective action, particularly when he insists that ‘the people’ must ‘constitute’ themselves as a political subject and emerge from the ‘corner’ to which elites have relegated them (D7). Petro's protagonism is reinforced in explicit calls to ‘move twice as much’, ‘mobilize those who do not vote’, and ‘convince’ those who supported ‘criminals’, in a register that combines personal self-legitimation with appeals to sustained popular action over time (D7). Petro argues that his popular movement won the elections and conformed a government, but it does not actually hold the ‘power’. This structures a narrative in which the president is simultaneously positioned as a victim of conspiracies and as the conductor of a transformation process driven ‘from below’, which aligns with the literature that characterizes populism by the centrality of the leader and their claim to embody the ‘true people’ (Müller, 2016; Poblete, 2015; Rosanvallon, 2020).

The rhetoric found in the speeches draws on symbolism and historical comparisons to strengthen his call for collective action, presenting the people as ‘constituent power’ capable of breaking the elite's encirclement and transforming the very structure of the State (D7, D13). These allusions are combined with references to historical violence, the repression of youth, and the continuity of conflict as consequences of the absence of effective popular participation, thereby framing social mobilization not only as a right but as a historical obligation in the face of a ‘power’ that operates against the general interest (D2, D5, D10).

One example that addresses the aforementioned ‘power’ is the controversy generated by his speech during a transport strike (D12), in which he delivered a presidential address in the evening to discuss a surveillance software called Pegasus, purchased by the government of his predecessor Iván Duque for eleven million dollars in cash during the social uprising that took place in Colombia in June 2021. In his address, he implicated two Colombian media outlets critical of him, particularly Semana magazine and Caracol Televisión: ‘How did eleven million dollars leave the country?’ In this way, the president ensures that journalists, media outlets, and social networks in Colombia have his addresses as a ‘center of attention’, where controversy, emotions, and polarization are constants.

The use of direct speech enhances the level of personalization of leadership by presenting the president as an immediate interlocutor of the people, articulating commitments in the first person and underscoring his mode of ‘doing politics from the truth’ (D2, D12). Expressions such as his assertion that he has ‘the habit of doing politics from the truth’ and his insistence on recounting his own trajectory of persecution, surveillance, and stigmatization reinforce the idea of authenticity and individual credibility, aligning with the role of direct speech as a tool for image construction and commitment noted by Perry (2013) (D2, D12). In parallel, indirect speech attributes agency to collectives (‘the people’, ‘popular youth’, ‘the peasantry’), reinforcing the notion of a historical subject acting against an opaque and concentrated ‘power’ (D1, D7, D13).

These speeches exhibit a strategic alternation between direct and indirect speech, mobilizing metaphors, and appeals to the people as a historical subject. The use of historical comparisons and analogies, along with the emphasis on transforming promises into action (‘it is time to act, and together, we will confront those who try to sow chaos and fear’), reinforces both emotional connection and political persuasion, situating the leader at the center of action while implicating citizens as fundamental protagonists of political change. This discourse reflects the narrative and populist imaginary that disregards nuances and presents a confrontation between the ’sowers of chaos’ and those self-proclaimed messianically as ’saviors’. In this case, ‘what matters is to arm resentment, to offer a possibility of revenge’ (Rosanvallon, 2020).

The use of metaphors constitutes a central tool to simplify problems while constructing a sense of urgency and belonging among the audience (Otieno, Owino and Attyang, 2016). This is observed in how the president transforms climate crisis, inequality, and state violence into narratives about ‘peoples’ who must act against powers that oppress them (D1, D2). These mental images are articulated with the idea that ‘everything depends on the people’ and that history only changes when citizens mobilize and collectively assume the direction of their own destiny, thereby reinforcing the affective identification between leader, cause, and political community (D5, D7, D13).

From this narrative, Petro justifies his political conduct by assuming himself as the authentic representative of the people (Müller, 2016). However, the connection between his discursive proposal of ‘rowing together in the same direction’ and confronting those who ‘try to sow chaos and fear’ reveals the renunciation of constructing a pluralist democracy project (Mouffe, 1999), one that commits to creating real possibilities for participation in decision-making, in which citizens with different political positions can sit at the same table.

Regarding discursive strategies, the president systematically combines the use of the first-person singular (through which he emphasizes his style of ‘doing politics from the truth’) with direct appeals to the ‘people’ as a collective subject called to mobilize (D2, D7, D12). He alternates direct and emotional statements with descriptions of historical and contemporary injustices, reinforcing an antagonistic people/oligarchy structure that legitimizes protest, constituent power, and action in the streets as necessary responses to an institutional order perceived as captured by mafia and economic interests (D4, D5, D10, D13).

These strategies seek to position discourse within citizens’ everyday lives, legitimizing political action through shared symbols (Otieno, Owino and Attyang, 2016). From the perspective of political linkage (Kitschelt, 2000), these discourses are oriented toward building broad coalitions and direct popular mobilization. His statements seek to strengthen the personal bond between leader and citizens, amplifying the legitimacy of governmental action on the basis of the political community as an active subject, rather than on rigid party structures. Primarily, he employs media-based and charismatic linkage types.

However, there is a pronounced use by the president of the first-person singular, which allows him to construct an image of an honest and persecuted leader who ‘does politics from the truth’ and personally confronts networks of espionage, corruption, and state violence (D2, D12). This insistence on the ‘I’ is articulated with biographical accounts of the repression suffered by him and his family, as well as with denunciations of attempted coups or silencing, reinforcing the personalization of political conflict and anchoring the legitimacy of the project in his individual figure (D2, D5, D7).

5 Discussion

These discourses of Gustavo Petro are populist, polemical, polarizing, and possess a strong emotional charge of confrontation, including attacks on the national press and Colombian journalists. The political linkage is fundamentally media-based in character, appealing to charisma and the figure of the leader rather than to government management as teamwork or as a political project tied to Colombian progressivism. He uses these presidential addresses to attack the very state in which he was elected (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). The fact that he speaks in the first-person singular, rather than the first-person plural, also implies a strong emotional and personalistic charge (Vergara, 2023).

The appeal to the people implies a direct confrontation between ‘elite’ and ‘people’, coinciding with the postulates of Wajner (2021), as the president makes calls for citizen mobilization and reiterates words or phrases such as ‘we the people’, ‘protest’, ‘popular sovereignty’, or ‘coup d'état’. The speeches are composed of metaphors (Otieno, Owino and Attyang, 2016) designed to be emitted in the public sphere: meetings with communities in regions, presence in the public squares of towns, and presence in Colombian media outlets, which includes daily criticisms of journalists and discourse on social networks that incentivize polarization.

Petro strategically assumes the profile of his interlocutor as a citizen who embraces the longing for a leader-savior, fueled by social discontent in the face of a state that historically does not tend to respond to their demands. From this assumption, he constructs a discourse that appeals to the construction of a ‘people’ that confronts those who generate ‘chaos’.

The use of social media to place his populist discourse on the public agenda reveals a political communication proposal that renounces direct dialogue with other political actors (Ardag et al., 2020). His media proposal reveals that he conceives of media as spaces for dissemination and confrontation of competing discourses, not necessarily as spaces of mediation for dialogue and citizen exchange. The objective is to achieve broad citizen support for his call for protest against organizations and leaders opposed to his political project (De la Torre and Mazzoleni, 2019). In this sense, he media-constructs the image of a president who oscillates between the hybrid figure of public manager and principal mobilizer of protest.

Petro's discourse frames the institutional actors as part of a ‘corrupt elite’. The president characterizes these actors as obstacles to the ‘will of the people’, which can be interpreted as an attempt to both erode the public perception of said ‘obstacles’ as well as excuse his administration's shortcomings (Del Tronco and Monsiváis-Carrillo, 2020). This is evident in speeches D2, D4, D5, and D12, where media outlets and judicial actors are accused of conspiring against his government.

Now, the appeal to ‘constituent power’ and direct mobilization (D7, D13) bypasses established institutional channels for political change. While social mobilization is a legitimate democratic right, the systematic framing of street protest as the only authentic expression of popular sovereignty delegitimizes representative institutions. This aligns with what Barrenechea and Vergara (2024) identify as the ‘emptying’ of democracy, wherein formal democratic procedures are preserved but stripped of substantive meaning as decision-making shifts toward unmediated appeals to popular mobilization.

Subsequently, the personalization of leadership around the president's figure (D2, D5, D7, D12) fosters a political culture in which accountability is displaced onto a single individual rather than distributed across institutions. As Vergara (2023) notes, this culture of personalistic politics increases polarization and reduces the incentives for cooperation among political actors, making democratic governance more fragile. The insistence on first-person singular narratives of persecution and authenticity constructs the president as irreplaceable, leaving little space for institutional continuity beyond his mandate.

It is important to acknowledge alternative interpretations of Petro's discourse. One could argue that his appeals to ‘the people’ and social mobilization are not necessarily populist but rather reflect a commitment to participatory democracy and the deepening of democratic institutions. From this perspective, his calls for constituent power could be understood as an effort to include historically marginalized sectors in political decision-making, consistent with Latin America's tradition of popular constitutionalism (Biglieri and Cadahia, 2021). Similarly, his confrontational stance toward media actors could be framed as legitimate criticism of entrenched interests that have historically excluded popular sectors from political participation.

However, the findings suggest that while Petro's discourse incorporates elements of participatory democracy, it does so within a populist framework that systematically constructs institutional actors as enemies of the people. The distinction is critical: participatory democracy seeks to expand institutional channels for citizen engagement, whereas Petro's discourse often frames institutions themselves as obstacles to be circumvented rather than spaces to be democratized. This is particularly evident in D7, where he explicitly calls for the people to constitute themselves as ‘constituent power’ outside existing institutional frameworks.

These results can be interpreted as the president engaging in ‘de-democratizing’ discourse (Barrenechea and Vergara, 2024), one which erodes the democracy proposal that the president himself put forward at the beginning of his government in 2022, insofar as it renounces the construction of a democracy project sustained by plural participation and the commitment to those consensuses that should generate citizen agreements to counteract the culture of personalistic politics, in addition to the stigmatization of opponents and the national press. In this interpretation, his discourse on social networks aligns more with a type of political communication that feeds a polarized democratic culture to the detriment of the management of a participatory democracy and the construction of a plural public sphere.

However, it is important to enumerate several limitations to better dimension the findings. First, the sample of this study comprises of YouTube automatic transcripts and the analysis is centered on specific categories associated with textual dimensions which omit paraverbal and nonverbal aspects of the discourse, such as his tone on certain words or the gestures he makes while holding a pencil. Since the unit of analysis focused specifically on speeches in which he alluded to social mobilization, there was no distinction wheter the speech was delivered in Colombian public squares or in a key international event (such as D3, D8, D9, D10). If we follow the distinction between a universal and particular audience originally proposed by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's (Aikin, 2008), the results of the audience or the way the speaker conducts himself could wildly differ, as the enunciative contexts differ significantly. Also, this study does not analyze the reactions of his speeches (whether by mass media, the public or public institutions), and without these, the effects of a de-democratization process (Gelabert, 2019) cannot be confirmed.

Nevertheless, this article does shed light on a political mechanism of the first president of the Colombian Political left. In advocating for social mobilization in his speeches, this leader polarizes the relationship between citizens and the political organizations that conform a democratic state. The former can not only wear at his public image but further distance him from the promotion of the public commonwealth and will of the people he claims to represent.

6 Conclusion

This study set out to analyze the discursive strategies employed by Colombian President Gustavo Petro when promoting social mobilization from the state sphere, with particular attention to the articulation of populist discourse and its implications for democratic stability in Colombia. Through the analysis of thirteen (13) presidential speeches delivered between December 2023 and December 2024, this research found that the discursive patterns identified are consistent with the qualitative hypothesis that Petro's discourse constitutes a discursive risk to democratic stability. The analysis revealed a recurrent pattern of polarizing language that appeals to ‘the people’ as a historical subject, minimizes political parties, personalizes leadership, and converts the presidential figure into the primary convener of protest. However, the findings do not allow for causal confirmation of institutional erosion, as the data consist of discourse rather than measures of institutional impact.

The qualitative hypothesis related to the Colombian context of political polarization helped explore how these discursive patterns may function as mechanisms of democratic erosion. The findings are therefore presented as evidence of discursive risk rather than as measures of institutional impact, which would require a different methodological approach.

Within this framework, Petro's discourse operates within a populist framework characterized by the appeal to the people and anti-elitism. The president systematically constructs a narrative in which institutional actors, are framed as obstacles to the ‘will of the people’, thereby legitimizing extra-institutional forms of political action such as street mobilization and appeals to ‘constituent power’.

While some scholars have argued that populism can serve as a democratizing force by incorporating marginalized sectors into political life (Laclau, 2010; Mouffe, 2023), the authors suggests that in the Colombian context, Petro's populist discourse does the opposite of deepening the trust in democratic institutions. The former occurs when the discourse reframes democracy through populism. Participatory democracy seeks to expand institutional channels for citizen engagement, whereas populist democracy, as evidenced in Petro's discourse, often frames institutions themselves as obstacles to be circumvented.

There are, however, several limitations to this study. The analysis is based on a single year of presidential speeches, which limits the ability to assess whether the observed patterns are consistent or contingent on specific political circumstances. The sample is restricted to speeches containing calls for social mobilization; analysis of routine governmental communication might yield different patterns. Even though the authors viewed the speech videos to ascertain the validity of the Llama AI-aided sampling, the units of analysis were YouTube automatic transcripts, which effectively means a double layer of AI filtering, which means it is difficult to evaluate the influence of YouTube's algorithm over the text files that were auto translated from Colombian Spanish. Additionally, the study focuses on discourse analysis and does not measure the reception or effects of these speeches on citizens’ attitudes or behaviors.

In lieu of this gap, future research could extend the temporal scope to compare Petro's discourse across different periods, examine whether similar patterns emerge in other Latin American leftist governments, and incorporate reception studies to understand how citizens interpret populist appeals. Comparative studies between Petro's discursive strategies and those of other populist leaders in the region would help clarify whether the patterns identified here are context-specific or reflect broader regional dynamics.

Ultimately, this work showcases the manner in which populist discourse can operate not as a tool for achieving power in an election, but from within the state apparatus to claim ownership the popular sovereignty. It does so by framing institutional actors as enemies of the people, appealing to direct popular mobilization as the only authentic expression of the people's authority. In personalizing leadership around his own figure, Petro's discourse can be seen as a sign of overreach within a pluralist democratic culture, which is an essential component for democratic stability.

Populism, regardless of its ideological orientation, carries inherent risks for democratic governance when it substitutes institutional mediation for unmediated appeals to the people. Understanding these dynamics is crucial not only for scholarship on populism and democracy but also for the practical task of building democratic resilience in Latin American countries.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. The tool Llama 3 was employed as an analytical tool in the data processing phase, specifically to conform the final sample that would be manually analyzed. All content has been reviewed and revised by the authors. The authors take full responsibility for the accuracy and originality of the work.

Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1863039/full#supplementary-material

Supplementary material Supplementary material at the source

Footnotes

Edited by: Lemy Bran, Metropolitan Institute of Technology, Colombia

Reviewed by: Jatmika Nurhadi, Indonesia University of Education, Indonesia

Laura Bonilla-Neira, Industrial University of Santander, Colombia