2025/08/14 by Maximilian Zehring, Emese Domahidi · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Computer Science · #Social Media and Politics #Digital Communication and Language #Computational and Text Analysis Methods
paper · doi:10.1080/1369118x.2025.2536160
Protest movements against COVID-19 containment measures, like Germany’s Querdenken, aim to put their position on the political agenda. The German far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) acted as an arm of Querdenken in the federal parliament, but the role of other parties remains unclear. The current paper explores Querdenken’s ability to stimulate the discourse in the political arena. We investigated language similarity between Querdenken and German politicians using n = 934,432 Querdenken Telegram messages and n = 445,690 tweets from all six major German parties across 2020–2021. Our approach combined sentence transformers, time series analysis, and a manual assessment. We found that, for different reasons, all German parties became increasingly semantically similar to Querdenken after fall/winter 2020. While the AfD’s communications are the most similar, the discrediting of left-wing and green politics and the spurning of coronavirus containment measures also unite parts of the Free Democratic Party and Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union in Bavaria with Querdenken. Our results highlight communicative resemblances to Querdenken among other established parties besides the AfD and raise questions about the strategic engagement with far-right discourses in anticipation of potential voter gains.