Interview with Mohamed Salhi: Surprises, symbols, and mainstreaming

Mohamed Salhi discusses his recent Journal of Language and Politics article, Suprises, symbols, and mainstreaming: Symbolic politics in AFD's European election campaign, exploring far-right crisis discourse.

Photo by Julia Taubitz on Unsplash

Far right populism constructs and narrates crises, with crisis-making being an core part of its discourse. This article looks at how the German radical right benefitted from external events and/or election surprises through its predatory capacities and knee-jerk reactions and its ability to turn anything into a civilisational crisis.

Why did you decide to write this piece?

Initially, I was planning to work on the German position on demonstrations critical of Israel, which saw both the radical right and the mainstream evoking a perpetual sense of crisis of, among others, security, immigration, and culture. The scope of the article changed before the elections when the Ausländer Raus song and then the anti-queer trend Stolz Monat became viral. As AfD was already actively framing Israeli-critical demonstrations as an overspill of antisemitism and immigrants as, among others, terrorists, they later appeared to borrow semiotic resources from the two trends in their official electoral campaign to support their nativist and anti-Muslim positions. I found their visual aesthetics something not to take lightly.

This mattered to me not only academically, but also personally. Being a first-generation immigrant doing research in Germany and observing its political dynamics, the past few months were dominated by a feeling of restlessness. The reactions to demonstrations critical of Israel brought out statements ranging from problematic to fully-fledged racist, not only from the usual suspects like radical or extreme right, but from respected media and political commentators. One of my favourites, ironically speaking, has to be the reference to immigrants as “hardly civilisable” (DE: Kaum Zivilisierbar) in the context of antisemitism. In the middle of this, the immigrants out and Stolz Monat went viral, driving reactions into oppositional directions, between delighted, condescending responses and scared and angry reactions.

Here, I felt the need to bring this to the fore and examine how exclusion unfolds in language and symbols use, targeting the three aforementioned dimensions.

What are the key takeaways?

This article covers three central dimensions that are increasingly relevant in the study of radical right populism, namely crisis discourse, visual and symbolic populism, and the mainstreaming of far right parties and ideologies. This was further confirmed during the federal elections in 2025, where AfD exploited occurring external events and election surprises such as the dramatic events in Aschaffenburg, Magdeburg, and Munich.

Far right populism constructs and narrates crises, with crisis-making being an core part of its discourse. This article looks at how the German radical right benefitted from external events and/or election surprises through its predatory capacities and knee-jerk reactions and its ability to turn anything into a civilisational crisis.

Working on visual (radical right) populism responds to the growing reliance on multimodal discourse to express overt and covert exclusionary discourses. It was very interesting to me hearing the Ausländer Raus as a soundtrack in parts of the official AfD campaign. It sounded (and was indeed) a challenge to the boundaries of the sayable. I was also intrigued how members and voters of the party—alongside extreme right trolls and activists—agreed that a Germanised version of the Pride Flag was to be a form of anti-queer identification.

The reactions of mainstream political figures and media were (and are) defensive of the German raison d'état (Staatsräson) and Israeli policies, despite (some) acknowledgment that the Israeli political leadership is–at best—right wing extremist. However, the turn to anti-migratory, anti-Muslim, anti-left, and anti-intellectual sentiments and anti-democratic practices, exemplified both a state of epistemic violence and a case where the mainstream contributes the mainstreaming of far right ideologies and discourses.

Where do you plan to go next in your research?

Crisis discourse remains an important research area to me. I am currently working on my first Elements book entitled “Crisis Discourse of the Radical Right” in which I examine the construction and narration of crises in the discourse of radical right populist parties in Western Europe. Alongside this, I am interested in navigating two further research areas related to far right discourses and mainstreaming.

On the one hand, I am working with a colleague on an article on RRPPs’ members with a migratory background. We initially envisioned work on social identity, but we shifted our attention to discuss how migrant-background members of RRPPs contribute to the mainstreaming of reactionary parties and ideologies. In this case, we consider the strategic function of migrant-background members as initiators of the de-demonisation of the radical right. Examining this from a social identity theory is still something we would love to pursue still. On the other hand, I am very interested in working further on epistemic violence against demonstrations critical of Israel’s punitive policies, and how this embedded a legitimisation of violence and exclusion. In this one, I work on developing a (proposed) methodological paradigm between poststructuralist discourse theory and Critical Discourse, which Katy Brown previously discussed, with a particular reference to Dispositive Analysis as developed by Jäger and Dialectical Relational Approach by Fairclough.