This newspaper even seems to act as a spokesperson for Santiago Abascal’s tastes and opinions on issues unrelated to politics:

[Ex. 33]. Santiago Abascal explains why he feels no sympathy for the Athletic Football Club of Bilbao, and criticises their “ethnic policy” with regard to signing players (OK Diario, 13/04/2019)

As pointed out by Reyes (1984: 206), the use of direct discourse in journalistic texts “constitutes an epistemological safeguard resulting from the impersonal character with which other people’s discourses are transmitted in news genres”. Thus, in some of the headlines we have analysed, the journalist simply identifies the subject as the source of the statements he or she is reproducing:

[Ex. 34]. Santiago Abascal: “But how many polling firms are going to close on 29 April” (El Confidencial, 22/04/2019)

Just like the “the professional who quotes social issues”, the journalist is “responsible for the reformulation of other people’s discourse, but not for the veracity of the statements made in the quote” (Mancera Rueda, 2009: 40). However, in several of the reproduced paragraphs (Girón Alconchel, 1985) included in our corpus, it is possible to identify direct-style statements that do not seem to have undergone any reformulation5, as they contain dysphemisms and terms characteristic of colloquial language, possibly in order to “portray” Vox candidates by displaying their particular idiolect:

[Ex. 35]. Vox and La Reconquista (The Reconquest) in the elections: “Don Pelayo was a guy with two balls” (El Confidencial, 12/04/2019)

[Ex. 36]. Abascal requests that police be allowed to evict squatters by “kicking them in the ass” without legal proceedings (El Español, 25/04/2019)

Of the demarcative signals in the quotation (Girón, 1985), the communicative verb is the one that best reflects the discursive framework that the journalist gives to the speech they reproduce. According to Maldonado González (1999: 3559), many verba dicendi (words of the speech) “include information that directly affects the way in which the receiver will interpret the quoted discourse. Therefore, a certain interpretation of the information is imposed on the receiver”. For example, in the following headline, the act of speaking uses a direct style and is given the illocutionary force of a warning, although it is striking that these statements are attributed to the party without identifying the speaker of the enunciation reproduced6:

[Ex. 37]. Vox warns Juanma Moreno: “From now on, there are no more deadline extensions”(OK Diario, 24/04/2019)

The verb warn can have an illocutionary meaning similar to the verb to threaten, “when the newspaper reader places the speeches cited by the journalist in relation to supposedly conflicting contexts, so that the consequences of what is said are assessed negatively by the recipient” (Méndez García de Paredes, 2001: 365). And in the following example, what is striking