Right-wing extremist language of the Alternative for Germany parliamentary group in the German Bundestag

The German political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is sometimes classified as a populist radical right party and sometimes as a far-right or right-wing extremist party. Can we find evidence for this more far-reaching classification in the parliamentary speeches of the AfD parliamentarians? The proposed paper addresses the following research question: To what extent do AfD members in the German Bundestag use right-wing extremist language in their speeches, and what factors influence this rhetoric? The paper examines the language of the AfD and reveals its extremist attitudes by analysing parliamentary speeches in the German Bundestag from 2017 to 2024 using a dictionary-based text classification approach. With this approach, I can identify the extent to which the AfD displays extremist and anti-democratic positions. The use of automatic text analysis is timely, and the investigation of right-wing extremist language will fill a gap in research, since qualitative studies have been conducted to date, but there are no quantitative studies of the AfD's language (cf. Salzborn 2020a; Pfahl-Traughber 2019a; Havertz 2021; Schulze 2021; Kraft 2021; Ruhose 2023; Detering 2019). Existing quantitative studies of the rhetoric are conceptualised through right-wing populism (cf. Esguerra et al. 2023; Lewandowsky et al., 2022) and therefore miss their extremist rhetoric. The scientific relevance stems primarily from the ongoing discourse about ideological classification. Assuming that the AfD is a right-wing extremist party, I can expect extremist positions to appear in their parliamentary speeches. Analysing their language is useful for assessing right-wing extremist positions. The research is based on 10,022 speeches given by 117 AfD members in the Bundestag (MdBs) during the 19th and 20th legislative period, which were retrieved from the Open Discourse Corpus and the GermaParl Corpus. By validating the use of 814 occurrences of right-wing extremist language in 539 speeches (12.1 percent of all AfD speeches) from 2017 to 2021, I can confirm right-wing extremist language is used by 69.6 percent of AfD MdBs. Evidence suggests the AfD exhibits extremist and anti-democratic positions in the way their MdBs speak, so the AfD’s ideology can be seen as right-wing extremist. These results are validated by the analysis of speeches from 2021 to the end of 2024. Building on that analysis and incorporating determinants such as the debate topic, the speaker, their background, and their party role, statistical regression analysis allows me to identify the factors that shape extremist language. Adding this layer allows me to assess whether the use of such language is driven by strategy or ideology and makes it possible to predict the occurrence of extremist language in parliamentary speeches.