Today, the significance of the Spanish monarchy is gradually increasing due to the social instability and fatigue from political turmoil. The public discourse of the Spanish King Felipe VI is an important type of political communication aimed at achieving agreement among all its participants. Within the framework of institutional political communication, his discourse, on the one hand, presupposes hierarchical relationships with the addressee, and on the other hand, the royal family tries to be closer to the society when it comes to their behaviour and speech. In this article we analyse the unifying function of the Spanish monarchy in the public speeches of Felipe VI from 2014 to 2025. We have found that the King keeps in mind the current sociopolitical context, projecting an image of a compassionate leader. Since the Catalan crisis of 2017, when the integrity of Spain was on the verge of collapse, his figure is perceived as a symbol of the unity of the nation and political stability, as an arbiter in a multinational and multicultural country. Ideologemes and metaphors of integrative semantics, as well as communicative strategies (mostly the strategy of the emotional mood of the addressee) transmit the idea of the need for national unity within the framework of a constitutional monarchy.
For citation: Zaalishvili I.V. The unifying function of the public discourse of the modern Spanish monarchy, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2026, iss. 2, pp. 86—95.