Republicanism with adjectives: aristocratic and democratic dimensions in campaign discourses on Brazilian presidential elections of 2006

The aim of this paper is to analyze the nature of political discourse of the two main presidential candidates in Brazil in 2006, taking as a primary source the campaign conveyed through Free Electoral Propaganda Telecast. It starts with a classical theoretical approach that divides the Republican discourse into two branches: aristocratic and democratic. On the one hand, advocates of restriction and, on the other, supporters of the expansion of political participation in state affairs. The first branch is based the rhetoric of political class distinction and, therefore, uses the technical argument, the expertise as a core element of good government performance. The second branch is based on the use of identity between representatives and represented using, for this purpose, the political argument that good government depends on the deepening of democracy through political participation and priority attention to the most needy population. The main objective of the paper was to check to what extent Geraldo Alckmin’s and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s electoral campaigns in television were able to translate each of these republican traditions