German Parties Shifted Towards Intuition-Based Rhetoric After the Far Right's Parliamentary Breakthrough

The study analyses 4.5 million tweets and 59,170 parliamentary speeches by German political elites from 2015 to 2025. Using a validated distributed-dictionary representation, it measures evidence-based versus intuition-based rhetoric through an Evidence Minus Intuition (EMI) score. Intuition-oriented language became more prominent in both arenas, while right-leaning actors consistently recorded the lowest EMI scores. The AfD’s parliamentary entry in 2017 coincided with a sharp EMI decline across the chamber; Twitter showed a more gradual decline. The findings establish an association, not a causal effect, between far-right parliamentary visibility and changing elite rhetoric.