Discourse Alliances: How the Far Right influences the Political Mainstream

How do far-right actors and ideas influence political mainstream actors? Recent election campaigns in Italy, Sweden and France have shown that far-right actors are gaining power in many established democracies, partly due to their well-established networks and alliances with mainstream parties. Previous research has shown that mainstream parties contribute to the influence of the far right by forming coalitions or adopting far-right positions. Yet, we still lack a long-term empirical assessment of the discourse alliances between far-right actors and mainstream parties and the extent to which far-right ideas normalise and influence mainstream communication. To this end, this paper investigates the evolution and structure of their discourse networks since the 1990s. This paper innovates by combining automated text analysis with multimodal network analysis to analyse the relations between actors and issues in mass media debates. We analyse more than 500,000 newspaper articles in six different newspapers in Germany over 26 years. The study presents a new way of analysing discourse networks and contributes to the understanding of the interaction between far-right mainstreaming and mainstream radicalization.