President Gustavo Petro’s calls for social mobilization as discursive risk: analyzing YouTube automatic transcripts

This study analyzes the populist discursive strategies of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, specifically examining how calls for social mobilization issued from the state sphere pose a discursive risk to democratic resilience in Colombia. Using a mixed-methods approach with a qualitative emphasis, the corpus was constructed by web crawling 601 videos from the official presidency YouTube channel published between December 2023 and December 2024. Automatic transcripts were filtered using natural language processing (NLP) libraries and a locally executed Llama 3 model. Thirteen speeches (5.7 hours of video) containing calls for mobilization were selected for inductive discourse analysis covering four dimensions: direct/indirect speech, metaphors, political linkage, and level of populism. Findings show a recurrent deployment of polarizing rhetoric, frequent appeals to “the people” as a historical collective subject, the minimization of political parties, and strong personalization of leadership. Petro constructs a narrative of direct representation through charisma-based and media-driven linkage strategies, positioning the presidential figure as the central instigator of street protest against political and economic elites. The study reveals that Petro's populist repertoire reframes Colombian political debate by promoting an inherent confrontation between “the people” and “elites.” By framing formal institutions as obstacles to the popular will and encouraging street mobilization over institutional channels, this rhetoric introduces a discursive risk that may affect trust in democratic institutions and democratic resilience in Colombia.