The Populist Radical Right and the Politicization of History: The Prominence, Mood, and Modi of Historical References in Parliamentary Language in Germany

While the collective memory of the past is a building block of the liberal-democratic order in many European countries, the rise of populist radical right parties risks challenging this foundation. The populist radical right typically claims to be the bearers of historical truth, typically centered around the notion of a “lost heartland.” By presenting themselves as the only bearers of historical truth, in contrast to other parties’ “false versions of history,” populist radical right parties are textbook “mnemonic warriors.” Shifting interpretations of history matter because they can importantly destabilize a political order. This paper combines the quantitative literature on populist radical right language with the qualitative literature on memory politics to investigate whether the populist radical right discusses history more frequently than other parties and what characterizes their historical discourse. Focusing on the hard case of Germany, we conduct a quantitative text analysis of national parliamentary speeches (2017—2021), combined with a qualitative analysis of all 316 speeches in which parliamentarians of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) referred to history in 2017 and 2018. We find that the AfD does not use historical markers more prominently than other parties. However, more positive moods characterize its language about history compared to its overall negative parliamentary language. Its parliamentarians use various modi within and across historical topoi, which create a multifaceted narrative of affirming and disavowing different mnemonic traditions. Our paper emphasizes the relevance of investigating the ways in which the radical right challenges established liberal norms, of which its engagement with history is one of the most important themes of contestation. Second, our analyses show that the radical right uses a complex and multi-layered narrative of historical continuity and distance that goes beyond a focus on World War II. This narrative employs different modes of engaging the past that demonstrate the extent to which the populist radical right needs to engage with the existing discursive rules. Finally, our paper employs a method of text analysis that closely integrates the quantitative and qualitative perspective when studying the repertoire of sentiments and historical themes the populist radical right draws on in its public (re)interpretation of the past.