Influencers Main parties allowing far right to set the agenda

Mainstream parties are increasingly allowing the far right to set the agenda, researchers in Germany have found, unwittingly helping the far right by legitimising their ideas and disseminating them more widely.

- By Ashifa Kassam

The findings, published in the European Journal of Political Research, were based on an automated text analysis of 520,408 articles from six German newspapers over the span of more than two decades.

The researchers found that as the far right moved from fringe issues in the late 1990s to topics such as integration and migration, mainstream parties had reshaped their communications to respond, boosting the spread of these ideas and signalling to voters that these ideas and stances were legitimate.

The overarching result had crucial implications for democracy, said Teresa Völker, a political sociologist at Berlin Social Science Center and coauthor of the study. “Political communication by mainstream parties plays a central role in the electoral success of the far right,” she said. “This factor has been underestimated.”

This impact was evident even when mainstream parties were criticising the far right. “You're still giving them attention,” said Völker. “Whoever sets the agenda has an impact on what voters think and who they vote for.”