Crisis as opportunity? Far-right mobilization in digital information environments during the COVID-19 pandemic

This study investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic reconfigured political, discursive, and mediation opportunity structures for digital far-right mobilization. Using a multilingual large language model to classify 41 million posts from far-right-affiliated accounts in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden (2019–2022), we analyze how anti-systemic discourse became integrated into established far-right repertoires through Markov transition analysis and logistic regression. We find substantial evidence of discursive convergence: anti-systemic messaging was associated with conspiracy, anti-progressive and authoritarian narratives, while Islamophobic content was less likely to co-occur. Evidence for political opportunity structures is more uneven, with the clearest longitudinal effects in the Danish-language environment, a later increase in the Swedish-language environment, and no positive adjusted period effect in the German-language environment despite a strong descriptive increase in anti-systemic posting. Evidence for mediation opportunity structures is likewise limited and heterogeneous across language environments. Overall, the pandemic produced a partial realignment rather than a uniform shift.