Rethinking Far-Right Influence: How Populist Radical Right-Wing Narratives Alter Mainstream Party Policy Agendas

Mainstream European parties have increasingly opted to converge with the policy proposals of populist radical right-wing parties (PRRPs), particularly on migration. This article suggests that common explanations for this phenomenon – emphasizing mainstream party electoral incentives – often fail to note the unique effects that populism has on political competition. Building on research on far-right mainstreaming, it argues that populists’ anti-systemic narratives reshape policy debates in ways that make anti-populist party elites more tolerant of new, radical ideas. This argument highlights two understudied phenomena in the literature on PRRP influence. First, it offers a framework for analyzing cases of ‘silent’ influence, where parties co-opt controversial aspects of a PRRP’s agenda while seeking to hide or even deny it. Second, it opens space for exploring the extent to which prominent PRRPs prompt deeper shifts in national policy agendas and exert “power over ideas” (Carstensen & Schmidt 2016). These dynamics are imperfectly captured in existing research which largely understands PRRP influence in terms of the strategic incentives of mainstream parties. One prominent argument is based on Downsian spatial theory, expecting parties to modify their positions following elections where PRRPs increase their vote share to avoid losing voters (Abou-Chadi & Krause 2020; Habersack & Werner 2023). This approach treats PRRPs like any other challenger party, meaning it often overlooks the growing literature exploring how populists disrupt broader patterns of political competition. Such research suggests populists possess unique and powerful means of agenda-setting (Schmidt 2023), mobilizing voters (Hay 2020), and maintaining passionate and loyal activists (Albertazzi et al. 2025). Another account of PRRP influence studies the mainstreaming of their ideas by skilled political entrepreneurs (Valentim 2024) and media (Brown & Mondon 2021). However, this literature rarely explicitly links these processes to policy change; indeed, some accounts simply revert to a strategic explanation, arguing that successful normalization reduces the electoral cost of mainstream party convergence (Hägerbäck & Norocel 2024). This paper focuses on populists’ central discourse: their introduction of binary establishment-anti-establishment frames to policy discussions. Mainstream parties often assent to these, branding themselves as an anti-populist opposition committed to upholding existing norms (Stavrakakis et al. 2018). This paper hypothesizes that this new axis of policy differentiation makes it easier for parties to consider partially adopting newly mainstreamed proposals by allowing them to retain their moderate image amid policy shifts. It analyzes a case that defies the expectations of both Downsian and mainstreaming theories: the refugee policies of the Greek SYRIZA government between 2015-9. Despite the initially increasing electoral risk and popularity of Golden Dawn (GD), SYRIZA refused to modify their rhetoric. Nevertheless, their policy output silently became more punitive over time (Zahariadis & Petridou 2023) despite GD’s eventual collapse in support. The paper uses process tracing to capture the sequence of strategic decisions made by party leadership, finding that they increasingly relied on refugee policy rhetoric which contrasted them against GD’s extremism, gradually faced less internal scrutiny for harsher policy outcomes, and eventually refashioned and adopted certain GD policy frames.