CONSTRUCTING LEGITIMACY: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF KEIR STARMER’S RESIGNATION SPEECH

Political resignation speeches represent an underexplored genre of political discourse where leaders attempt to preserve legitimacy while giving up formal authority.In contemporary mediatised democracies, political leadership is often evaluated not only through policy outcomes but also through the ability to construct persuasive narratives of responsibility, success, institutional continuity, and public trust.This study investigates the discursive strategies employed in Keir Starmer's resignation speech and linguistic means of their realisation to research how political legitimacy is reconstructed at the moment of leadership transition.The research applies Critical Discourse Analysis based on Fairclough's threedimensional model, van Dijk's ideological approach, and Wodak's discourse-historical perspective.The analysis focuses on evaluative language, metaphors, pronoun distribution, narrative construction, and discursive omissions.The results demonstrate that the resignation speech constructs a transformation narrative from a crisis-ridden past, successful political leadership to a stable institutional future.Positive self-presentation is emphasised through moralised vocabulary focusing on decency, fairness, dignity, and responsibility.The distribution of singular and collective pronouns separates responsibility and political achievement.Metaphors present political change as renewal and progress, while the omission of internal political conflicts and failures depoliticises the resignation and represents it as responsibility, not a political failure.Resignation speeches function as means of legacy construction that influence public perceptions of political authority.The research adds to the conceptualising of resignation discourse as a distinct political genre and broadens the understanding of legitimacy construction in contemporary political communication.