''There was a problem, and it was solved!'': legitimating the expulsion of 'illegal' migrants in Spanish parliamentary discourse

In this article we examine some discursive aspects of political legitimation by analyzing the speech of the Spanish Secretary of the Interior, Mayor Oreja; on the occasion of a military-style expulsion of a group of African 'illegal' migrants from Melilla-the Spanish enclave in Morocco-in the summer of 1996. After a theoretical analysis of legitimation, we study three levels of legitimation: (a) pragmatic: various strategies of the justification of controversial official actions; (b) semantic: the ways a discourse represents its partisan view of the events or properties of actors as 'true' or as the 'facts'; and (c) sociopolitical: the way official discourse self-legitimates itself as authoritative and delegitimates alternative discourses. For these various aspects of legitimation, several levels of discursive structure (style, grammar, rhetoric, semantic moves, etc.) are examined in some detail.