Politeness as a strategy of attack in a gendered political debate—The Royal–Sarkozy debate

This article examines the televised debate between Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy, which took place on 2 May 2007, a few days before the second round of the French presidential election. The objective is to assess whether or not the presence of a woman candidate in the second round, for the first time in French history, had an impact on the debate, and to examine how the two French presidential candidates addressed each other during the two-hour debate. Transcriptions analyzed using the Lexico3 software developed by the SYLED-CLA2t at University of Paris 3 serve as the basis of the content and statistical analysis. Results indicate differential strategies: Nicolas Sarkozy makes excessive displays of deferential politeness and uses a wide range of registers; Ségolène Royal is more combative and formal. While Ségolène Royal makes use of a series of coordinated sentences, concrete explanations and examples, Nicolas Sarkozy tends to refer to abstraction. I hypothesize that this is informed by gender assumptions about politeness and the ethos of discourse of power – meaning manipulation and control through discourse in the political domain.