A CONSTRU O DA IMAGEM POLíTICA DE DILMA ROUSSEFF COMO M E DO POVO BRASILEIRO

It is intended to show how the electoral campaign of Dilma Rousseff (PT) was conducted to present her as the candidate of the Lulism and in this way it was anchored in a complex candidate political image construction strategy as Mother of the Brazilian people. To achieve this purpose, a qualitative analysis of the political speech was carried through having as analysis corpus: speeches pronounced in public events, in 2008 and 2009, by the Brazilian president, at that moment, Lula; the film Lula, the son of Brazil, launched in January 2010; and 20 television programs that composed the free time for political propaganda (Horário Gratuito Político Eleitoral - HGPE) of the candidate, exhibited from August 17th to September 30th, 2010. It is revealed that the use of such metaphor made possible the sustentation of the argument that Dilma’s model of government was the same of the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as much as it functioned as an emotional appeal to draw the voters’ attentionand to motivate the processing of the political information.