Parties of both the center-right and the center-left are unintentionally strengthening far-right parties by repeating their ideas and rhetoric in a doomed attempt to shrink their support, according to a new study by the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB).

The study, published in late September in the European Journal of Political Research and based on analysis of over 500,000 articles from six German newspapers over 26 years, came to the conclusion not only that far-right actors are dragging the political center to their issues, but that this is true of both center-right and center-left parties.

The far right has been steadily gaining ground across Europe in the past few years, with the right-wing populist Reform UK and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) now often leading opinion polls. This comes despite -- or perhaps because of -- the fact that political leaders of the major centrist parties have attempted to win over their voters by imposing ever-tougher measures on immigration and using more anti-immigrant rhetoric.

In Germany this week, the use of racist rhetoric has been the subject of public debate -- and in many quarters outrage -- following Chancellor Friedrich Merz's remarks about Germany's "cityscape" and the supposed impact on it by immigrants. A few days later, asked by a journalist to clarify the remark, he doubled down, saying "ask your daughters what I might have meant."

Such remarks mirror language used by center-left leaders in other European countries: In May, Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that Britain risked becoming "an island of strangers" without more curbs on immigration. Similarly, Merz's predecessor Olaf Scholz, of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), famously told Der Spiegel magazine in 2023 "We must finally deport on a large scale" -- the same promise that Merz made last week.

That seems to suggest that centrist political parties believe the best strategy to combat the rise of the far right is by sounding and acting tougher on immigration.

But that logic is flawed, according to Teresa Völker, political scientist at the WZB and one of the authors of the new study. "If center-right and center-left politicians try to attract voters with anti-immigration rhetoric, they increase the visibility of issues owned by the far right," she told DW by email. "When mainstream parties mimic the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the far right, they bring such ideas from the fringes into the mainstream debate. Thereby, they legitimize the far right and their demands.

"Those who adopt the interpretive frames and issues of the far right promote the dissemination of far-right ideas," she added.

But not all experts are convinced by the study's conclusions. Uwe Jun, political scientist at the University of Trier, thinks that though Merz's comments might be polarizing, the real world of politics is more complex than the study acknowledges and that politicians are forced to try different strategies.

"This is a correlation, not a causality," he told DW. "They can't prove that the rise of the far right can really be put down to this. Conservative parties, like all parties, have to be responsive. They have to reflect their members and voters, and many of their members and voters aren't that far away from right-wing populist or far-right parties."

That reality, Jun said, puts Merz and conservative parties across Europe in a difficult strategic position. "On the one hand, they want to implement what their own voters and members want; on the other hand, they are then accused of running after the right-wing populists," he said.

It is true that political scientists are still divided on whether there is a direct causal link between the mainstream adoption of far-right language and policy and the success of far-right parties -- but there is evidence pointing that way.

A study on voter transitions published in 2022 entitled "Does accommodation work?" by Werner Krause, Denis Cohen and Tarik Abou-Chadi concluded there was at least no evidence to suggest the strategies of Merz and Starmer will reduce radical right support.

"If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right," the authors concluded. This effect is particularly pronounced, the authors found, when the radical right parties are already well-established, as most European far-right parties now are.

Diane Bolet, assistant professor in political behavior at the University of Essex in the UK, agreed. "There's evidence suggesting that accommodating the radical right does not help the mainstream parties, but one thing we know it does is raise the issue of immigration, and that would tend to benefit the party that dominates the issue," she told DW.

The AfD was only founded in 2013, and other far-right extremist parties in Germany, including the Republikaner and the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), failed to gain a foothold in the electorate in recent decades as the AfD has. By contrast, other European countries have had established far-right parties -- like the National Front in France (now National Rally) and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) -- in their political landscape for decades.

But this only shows that Germany has failed to learn from its neighbors, according to Constantin Wurthmann, research fellow at the Mannheim Center for European Social Research.

There have been, he said, plenty of studies in other European countries that revealed the same processes as those the new WZB study found. But they were not taken seriously, he said.

"Our politicians could have learned from other European countries if they had wanted to," he told DW. "But from today's perspective, I would say it seems our politicians didn't want to learn." Wurthmann argues that adopting the language of the far right -- which Merz did this month -- only strengthens far-right parties.

"Of course, then you will bring radical right-wing positions into the political center," said Wurthmann. "It seems that active politicians apparently aren't conscious of how central their task is in preventing something like that from happening."

Edited by: Kyra Levine

Does adopting far-right rhetoric help the political center?