Analysis of the Televised Debate of the Presidential Election in Tunisia: Application of Aristotle’s Ethos, Pathos and Logos

Politicians’ speeches are carefully worded with the aim of conveying their messages effectively and achieving their objectives of gaining public support. such speeches usually contain rhetorical devices used to emotionally and politically exploit people. there is a need to point out how politicians use rhetoric in their speeches to easily convince people of their ideas and policies. therefore, this research seeks to address how rhetoric was operationalized in the televised debate of the second round of the presidential election held between two presidential candidates of tunisia: kaïs saïed and nabil karoui. the debate that lasted about 120 minutes was manually transcribed. content analysis on the data was processed through nvivo 8 software with a focus on aristotelian (2014) means of rhetoric-logos, ethos, and pathos- to demonstrate how the politicians used rhetorical devices and linguistic items to convince the tunisians of their views and manifestos. findings showed both candidates used personal pronouns and possessive pronouns together with rhetorical devices in their arguments and counterarguments in relation to key national and international issues. thus, both the political leaders used rhetorical elements persuasively.