Languages of the New Right

This project focuses on the language of the extreme right and explores how it may have seeped into public debate, subsequently raising radical right parties’ electoral prospects.

It seeks to explore the electoral success of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in this light. Using data to trace the AfD’s communication in 2014-21 and state-of-the-art-methods, the project measures the level in which extreme right debate has emerged into the mainstream.

The project focuses on the differences between the language used by party representatives in the context of party meetings as opposed to the languages used in parliamentary speeches and interventions. The project also leverages subnational analysis (East and West Germany) and short-term-changes in the language of AfD politicians in the temporal proximity of events of extreme right violence.

The project will yield a first-of-its-kind database on the language of the extreme right, which will constitutes an important resource for future research on the “normalization” of extreme right language in Western democracies and its effects on the rhetoric of centre-right parties.