AfD’s Memory Politics: Less Negative About History, Not More Frequent

What the Authors Ask

Matthias Dilling and Félix Krawatzek investigate whether populist radical right (PRR) parties act as "memory entrepreneurs"—actively contesting and reshaping public historical narratives—and if so, how prominent and what tone those attacks take. The question matters because challenges to dominant historical interpretations can undermine shared civic foundations and reshape political debate.

How the Study Was Done

The authors use an integrated mixed-methods design focused on Germany. Their approach combines:

• A quantitative analysis of national parliamentary speeches from 2017–2021 to measure how often politicians invoke historical markers and to assess sentiment when they do.
• Collocation (word-association) analysis to identify the concepts that cluster with historical references.
• A qualitative close reading of every speech by Alternative for Germany (AfD) from 2017–2018 to trace patterns of affirmation and disavowal of different mnemonic traditions.

Key Findings

• The AfD does not mention historical markers more frequently than other parties in the parliamentary record; challenges to mainstream historical interpretations are not more prominent in volume.
• When AfD politicians do speak about history, their language is distinctly less negative compared to the party's overall rhetoric—suggesting a softer or more measured tone specifically around historical topics.
• Collocation and qualitative evidence show the AfD both affirms and rejects different mnemonic traditions in a nuanced way rather than offering a single, unified revisionist narrative.
• Together, these results portray PRR engagement with public memory as complex: not a blunt effort to dominate discourse by sheer frequency or uniform denunciation, but a selective, strategic engagement with established historical norms.

Why This Matters

This study refines debates about populist memory politics by showing that prominence and tone are separate dimensions: a party can be influential in memory debates through selective framing and tone rather than by sheer volume of historical references. For scholars of political communication, party competition, and democratic memory, the findings highlight the need to look beyond counts of references and to examine sentiment and contextual usage when assessing the political impact of historical contestation.