POPULISTISK RETORIKOCH SVENSKA PARTILEDARE

Sammanfattning: In recent years, populism has spread around the world like wildfire. In some places, populist parties are growing in strength and several countries currently have populist leaders. In this essay, we use a qualitative content analysis to investigate whether populist rhetoric has seeped into state power in Sweden through examination of the speeches presented by Swedish party leaders during party leader debates in the Swedish Parliament in 2019 and 2020. The analyses of the party leader debates showed that several components of populist rhetoric could be found in speeches made in the Swedish parliament in 2019 and 2020, especially when it comes to anti-elitist rhetoric. However, the use of populist rhetoric is not widespread, but is mainly used by one of the eight Swedish party leaders, with some tendencies to a spillover-effect.