In this paper we examine the strategies of (im)politeness used by the deputies who participated in the Spanish electoral debates of 2008. For this, we start making a background and we investigate the most relevant theories related to the study of (im)politeness. Then, we present the corpus, and we put examples to several theories about (im)poleteness with snippets extracted of such electoral debates. In conclusion, we emphasize that the two political parties choose in more occasions for to attack the image of his opponent than for to give a good image of themselves, although the opposition party is who displays more strategies of attack.

Debate, political discourse, electoral campaign, conversational turn-taking, pragmatics and (im)politeness.