Unintended Normalization: Engaging with the Far Right and Discursive Dilemmas in German State Parliaments

How can parties respond to the popularity of a far-right challenger’s nativist messages and historical revisionism? This paper adopts a deliberative view of democracy and theorizes four potential discursive strategies based on parties’ engagement with a) perceived voter grievances and b) far-right narratives. We assess their prominence in German state parliaments between 2014 and 2019 – the level and period of parties’ initial encounter with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) – by combining a dictionary-based quantitative text analysis with an in-depth analysis of speeches selected through topic models. We operationalize nativism and revisionism with well-tested dictionaries that allow us to go beyond studies that have privileged a ‘mandate’ view of democracy and used manifestos to investigate to what extent parties accommodate popular far-right positions. Combining quantitative with qualitative insights, our findings reveal an important dilemma: While explicit accommodation of far-right narratives was rare, at least during the initial period of the AfD's rise, parties struggled to propose an alternative narrative. The far right often said things that other parties could not or did not want to leave uncommented, especially when the far right politicized topics relating to divisions between and within parties in the past. Yet, by commenting – typically in the form of correcting or criticizing, parties repeated and thus unintentionally contributed to normalizing the thematic connections drawn by the far right.