Interactional Ethos: The Political and Electoral Debate between Eduardo Paes and Wilson Witzel in 2018

Abstract In the second round debate of the 2018 elections, the candidates Eduardo Paes (DEM) and Wilson Witzel (PSC) faced each other. Bearing in mind that the interest in the political and electoral debate is to triumph over the adversary, the sel-image - prior to the speech or properly developed in it -, often determines the successful adherence of an of an audience and the eventual success of a project of saying undertaken with a certain purpose. Our study proposes an analysis over the tension resulting from the image maneuvering projected in the debate of 2018, focusing on the situations with discursive tension in the second round of the election process to the position of Governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro. In order to do that, we aligned the theoretical and methodological bases from the studies of the interactional ethos (KERBRAT-ORECCHIONI, 2016; CHANAY; KERBRAT-ORECCHIONI, 2007) with the semiolinguistic analysis of the political discourse (CHARAUDEAU, 2016, 2011).