Estratégias discursivas para a legitimação da ditadura: entre 'política de verdade' e política da verdade

Equipped with balanced budgets and international praise for his work, António de Oliveira Salazar became Minister of Finance on April 27, 1928, with reinforced powers as per usual at the time. After several crises caused by the instability of the government, which gave rise to a new formation of the executive, the resolution of the last one is followed by the third speech made in public by Salazar, on October 21, 1929, in the Sala do Conselho de Estado, for the occasion of the homage paid to him by the Municipal Councils of the country. The main theme of the paper is precisely the aforementioned speech, entitled "Política de Verdade; Política de Sacrifício; Política Nacional", where the Minister sets out his ideas on the future of the country and calls for the writing of a new Constitution, capable of creating a stable political order. The study intends to identify some of the linguistic strategies applied by Salazar to gain the trust of his public and, in this specific case, to gain consensus regarding the legitimation of the dictatorship. To this end, we will focus our analysis on aspects such as the ethos and the regime's association with the dichotomy of truth and lie, which suggests that ditadura is true politics and, indisputably, the politics of truth.