Abstract This article examines how democracy and legitimate political leadership are discursively constructed in President Bola Ahmed Tinubu's 2025 Democracy Day Address delivered before a joint session of Nigeria's National Assembly. The study adopts Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Model of Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate the interaction between textual features, discursive practices and wider socio-political structures in the address. The data comprise the 2025 Democracy Day speech, which foregrounds Nigeria's democratic history, the June 12 struggle, political pluralism, economic reform, freedom of expression and collective national responsibility. The analysis reveals that Tinubu strategically employs inclusive pronouns, modality, metaphor, parallelism, contrast, repetition, evaluative language and historical references to construct democracy as a hard-won collective achievement and an unfinished national project. At the level of discursive practice, the address recontextualises the memory of military rule and the June 12 struggle to connect past democratic sacrifices with contemporary political leadership. At the level of social practice, the discourse legitimises presidential authority by associating the administration with democratic continuity, political tolerance, economic development and national progress. The article argues that the address transforms democratic memory into a significant resource for political legitimation while simultaneously constructing leadership as both an exercise of presidential authority and a collective responsibility. The study contributes to scholarship on Nigerian political discourse by demonstrating how commemorative presidential rhetoric functions as a site for negotiating the relationship between democracy, memory, power and political legitimacy. Keywords: Critical discourse analysis; democracy; political legitimacy; presidential discourse, Tinubu