The research presented in this dissertation focuses on figurative expressions which appeared in Croatian political discourse during the 2011 electoral campaign for the Croatian Parliament. They are analysed from a Cognitive Linguistic point of view in order to establish which of the following three cognitive mechanisms serve as a basis for those figurative expressions: conceptual metaphor, metonymy or conceptual integration. Prior to the analysis of the corpus elicited from transcripts of various spoken events during the campaign, definitions of discourse and political discourse are offered, and the reasons for the choice of spoken over written political discourse are explained. Following this there is an overview of figurative linguistic expressions, first and foremost the historical overview of metaphor and metonymy, as well as their contemporary status within the Cognitive Linguistic research. Since there is no universal method for recognising and eliciting examples from the corpus which hasn’t shown some signs of deficiency, this study used a combination of several methods. I used a modified and combined method derived from Steen et al.’s (2007, 2010) methods, MIP and MIPVU, for identification and excerption of figurative expressions at the lexical level, whereas for the analysis at the conceptual level the modified method used was a combination of strategies from Stefanowitsch’s (2006) model. The analysis of examples showed that Croatian political discourse is very figurative, where metaphors appear almost three times as frequently in the corpus than metonymies, whereas conceptual integration appears in slightly above 4% of the total of the examples. The roles that metaphors, metonymies and conceptual integrations play are diverse, but their most frequent purpose is persuasion and manipulation, delegitimisation or legitimisation of politicians and parties, they are used to insult and discredit a political opponent, very frequently to mock or deride. Linguistic means used to perform these 238 roles are, among others, euphemisms, dysphemisms, humour, insults etc. By repeating specific lexemes and phrases in pre-election times neural links in the brain of the listener-voter are strengthened, which contributes to the process of conventionalisation of those expressions. Frequent use and repetition of one and the same expression may contribute to forming specific attitudes and ideologies by the recipient of the message.