Affective polarization among voters and elites—the disliking of political opponents—are of increasing concern in many multi-party democracies. However, previous research considered them in isolation. In this paper, we ask: How does emotionally loaded elite-level discourse about partisan competitors affect mass-level affective polarization? We argue that elite-level messaging and AP is a main driver of mass-level AP and that partisan voters rely upon elite-cues to make sense of partisan competition. When elites then start attacking political competitors with emotively loaded language, this leads to more affective polarization in the public. To test this argument, we develop a novel measure of elite-level polarization in parliamentary debates of the German Bundestag using dependency-parsing and embedding-enhanced dictionaries. We combine this measure with longitudinal public opinion data to disentangle the relationship between parliamentary discourse and partisan voters‘ opinions. Preliminary results suggest that elite-level hostility and partisan polarization are indeed correlated but the direction of causality is so far unclear. The connection is particularly pronounced for the dislike of the radical right challenger party. This study highlights one major driver of mass-level AP and has implications for the study of affective polarization and party competition in Europe.