What leads mainstream elites to adopt inflammatory rhetoric targeting immigrants and ethnic minorities? Such rhetoric has significant implications for everything from public opinion and party politics, to inter-group attitudes and social norms, and yet we know surprisingly little about what induces mainstream parties to accommodate far right rhetoric in the first place. I analyze mainstream rhetoric by using a hitherto underutilized data source, namely parliamentary speeches, where I employ a novel computational text analysis approach to identify anti-immigrant and anti-minority rhetoric by MPs in six European countries. Results indicate that mainstream parties tend to emulate far right rhetoric following far right party electoral successes, corroborating findings from the literature on positional accommodation. However, evidence suggests that mainstream elites also initially opt rhetorical accommodation before positional accommodation. The article contributes to the burgeoning literature on the interplay between mainstream and far right elites, by investigating the oft neglected rhetorical dimension of politics.