candidates without government power and extra-institu ­tional entrepreneurs can deploy illiberal frames to reshape what is considered legitimate, possible and even“common sense”(Newth and Scopelliti, 2025). Rhetorical strategies, unlike policy implementation, are low-cost and high-diffusion, which helps to explain why discursive erosion typically pre­cedes institutional change. The“contagion effect” that far-right parties aim at is well-­established. Research has documented how especially main ­stream conservative parties, under electoral pressure, tend to accommodate far-right positions by adopting restrictive platforms on immigration, crime and“sovereignty”(Meguid, 2008; Abou-Chadi and Krause, 2020). Our contribution seeks to trace it at the level of discourse, where the battle is fought first and where early intervention remains possible. What we measured: two pillars, seven arenas Drawing on Robert Dahl’s(1971) foundational work, we understand liberal democracy as resting on two necessary pillars: public contestation(can organised alternatives compete freely under protected civil and informational freedoms?) and inclusive participation(is suffrage broad and are elections clean?). We translated these pillars into seven concrete institutional arenas in which leaders signal their democratic commitments, or the lack thereof: Contestation: (i) civil liberties(speech, assembly, expression); (ii) media and alternative information(press freedom, pluralism); (iii) pluralism and opposition(legitimacy of rivals, accept ­ance of dissent); (iv) right to organise(unions, associations, protests); (v) checks and balances, and rule of law(judicial in­dependence, horizontal accountability) Participation: (vi) electoral integrity(free and fair elections, contestation of office); (vii) inclusive citizenship(broad suffrage, membership ­criteria). Illiberal discourse thus comprises rhetoric that narrows contestation and/or restricts participation. Relevant and typical examples include delegitimising opponents, politi ­cising courts, pressuring the media, excluding minorities and questioning electoral legitimacy. Our analysis is based on thousands of elite interviews with political leaders spanning the ideological spectrum in Spain and Argentina. With these two cases we include variation in institutional design(parliamentarism vs presidentialism), far-right positioning(consolidated opposition vs insurgent victory) and mainstream-right structures(strong vs weak). For each leader, we measured both the intensity of illiberal cues(how extreme is the rhetoric) and their emphasis(how often deployed), enabling comparisons between and within contexts. We used a large language model(GPT-5) to code the inter ­view transcripts, treating each answer by a leader as one ob ­servation and identifying how often and how strongly illiber ­al rhetoric appeared. Each response was scored from 1(com ­pletely liberal) to 4(completely illiberal), across a total of 255 interviews and 2,572 individual responses. What we found: two patterns, one playbook Spain: a clear gradient The importance of illiberal discourse in Spain depends strongly on ideology. Santiago Abascal’s Vox scores highest in almost all dimensions, except for the‘alternative media’ one. The mainstream right leaders(from Partido Popular) 1 sit in the middle, noticeably elevated on alternative media but more moderate on rule of law and civil liberties. Left leaders remain consistently the most liberal across dimen ­sions(see Figure 1). This pattern sharpens when relative values are considered. Vox’s salience-weighted mean reaches 2.72 on contestation compared with the Left’s 1.81. Overall, approximately 84 per cent of illiberal rhetoric in Spain targets contestation (media, courts, pluralism) rather than participation. The message is clear: Spain’s illiberal playbook concentrates on delegitimising rivals, politicising courts and attacking press freedom, and these strategies are much more prevalent in far-right discourse. Argentina: a bipolar configuration Figure 2 shows that Argentina presents a more complex picture: a U-shaped pattern in which far-right and left-wing discourses 2 converge at similarly high illiberal levels, while the mainstream right anchors the liberal baseline. 1  The PP’s leaders we analysed are Pablo Casado and Alberto Nuñez de Feijó. 2  In our analysis, the left-wing leader under examination is Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whereas on the centre-right we focus on Mauricio Macri. Tracing illiberal talk – How far-right rhetoric erodes ­democracy before policies change 2