British Journal of Social Psychology (2018) © 2018 The British Psychological Society www.wileyonlinelibrary.com Commemoration in crisis: A discursive analysis of who ‘we’ and ‘they’ have been or become in ceremonial political speeches before and during the Greek financial downturn Theofilos Gkinopoulos* and Peter Hegarty University of Surrey, UK This study analyses the discourse of statements of the leaders of two Greek political parties commemorating the restoration of Greek democracy on 24 July 1974; the ruling party New Democracy and the opposition, Coalition of the Radical Left. We focus on how these leaders act as entrepreneurs of their identities by constructing their ingroups in broad or narrow terms and their outgroups in vague or specific terms. These constructions were ventured during a period of relative political stability (2008) and instability (2012), and we focus on how ingroup prototypes and group boundaries are narrated across Greece’s past, present and future in ambiguous or concrete terms. The study aligns the social identity approach to political leadership with studies on political discourse and ‘the rhetoric of we’. We view commemorative statements as historical charters and respond to calls for discourse analysis to take greater account of historical context. The findings suggest concrete hypotheses about how leaders with different amounts of political support might define, as identity entrepreneurs, who ‘we’ are, and who ‘we’ are not in democratic contexts marked by stability or crisis. In a recent study of identity entrepreneurship, Reicher and Haslam (2017) examined how Donald Trump’s political success was enabled by his construction of himself as prototypical of the ‘ordinary American’ (p. 28). Identity entrepreneurship describes how leaders’ regrouping of diverse communities into a single overarching group, and frame their political projects as the instantiation of that group’s norms and the leader as the prototypical group member (Condor, Tileaga, & Billig, 2013; Haslam, Reicher, & Platow, 2011; Reicher & Hopkins, 2001). But political legitimacy sometimes requires a leader to be seen by their followers as also something more than average. This study examines the question of when leaders strive to appear akin to the people that they enjoin to follow them, and when they strike to position themselves beyond those people. To this end, our study examines variation in political leaders’ rhetorical accomplishment of identity entrepreneurship in different macropolitical context across time periods. We examine this thesis empirically through a discourse analysis of modern Greek political leaders’ commemorative statements of the restoration of democracy in 1974. Group history provides an important resource with which leaders can broker their legitimacy as political representatives in democracies and other societies (Liu & Hilton, 2005). By constructing group narratives, political leaders align collective action with the *Correspondence should be addressed to Theofilos Gkinopoulos, University of Surrey, Surrey GU2 7XH, UK (email: tg00344@surrey.ac.uk). DOI:10.1111/bjso.12244 1