German Far-Right Mainstreaming on TikTok

Alongside the far-right parties’ continued electoral successes, their topics have become increasingly more mainstream [1]. While some regard this change as primarily achieved through outside actors such as the far right and their supporters, others emphasize the role of elite actors in the process of mainstreaming far-right ideologies, arguing that the elite’s role of shaping public discourse enables them to influence what is deemed acceptable and what is not [1, 2]. In this paper, we seek to better understand the driving forces of mainstreaming through the example of German political parties and politicians on TikTok. We analyze online behavior of mainstream actors in Germany their response to the German radical right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) We collected 35,587 TikTok videos created by 815 accounts from German parties or politicians between March 2017 and September 2024 to test whether mainstream actors responded to topics propagated by the radical right. We only considered political accounts affiliated with parties represented in the 20th German Parliament, active between 26. October 2021 and 25. March 2025, covering most of the timeframe of the data. We identified the ten most popular topics propagated by the AfD and determined the frequency with which each party posted about the ten issues. To learn whether mainstream party actors were adapting their behavior to the AfD, we identified weeks in which the radical right party deviated from their usual posting behavior per topic. We compared the remaining parties' posting patterns before and after the deviation. We repeated the same analysis for the mainstream parties and the AfD's reaction to account for potentially mutual influences. Concerning three of the AfD's main topics, any reaction outside an election context to the party's change in behavior resulted in increased posts by the remaining parties. Within the context of an imminent election, the parties decreased their posting. However, the decrease may be due to the increased number of mainstream party videos leading to the election. Testing for reverse effects does not reveal the same patterns. Instead, most effects are followed by a decrease in videos posted, regardless of the election context. Most notably, the radical right party did not display the same behavior regarding topics championed by mainstream actors as they did to issues advocated by the radical right party. The increased posting in response to the radical right party indicates a direct influence from the AfD on mainstream parties while the increase in their topics leading up to elections suggests a more indirect influence. However, this effect does not apply to events with a larger geopolitical context. References [1] Tjitske Akkerman, Sarah L De Lange, and Matthijs Rooduijn. Inclusion and mainstreaming?: Radical right-wing populist parties in the new millennium. In Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe, pages 1–28. Routledge, 2016. [2] Vicente Valentim and Tobias Widmann. Does radical-right success make the political debate more negative? evidence from emotional rhetoric in german state parliaments. Political Behavior, 45(1):243–264, 2023.