How does radical right parliamentary presence impact mainstream party strategies on democracy? In contrast to existing accounts of adversarial and accommodative party strategies, I expect that mainstream parties will adopt dismissive strategies on the democracy issue because they do not expect electoral gains from the competition on democracy and are ideologically bound to the liberal-democratic status quo. Previous research has examined mainstream party responses to radical right success on issues like the economy and immigration. As radical right parties demand more direct democratic forms of participation and criticise key veto players, I argue that democracy itself has become an electoral issue that parties compete on. I focus on European party systems between 2000 and 2021. First, I use a large language model to classify statements from election manifestos based on their content regarding democracy. Using the discontinuities created by national electoral thresholds, I then identify the causal effect of radical right parliamentary presence on mainstream party emphasis and positions on democracy. My findings show that radical right parliamentary presence leads to mainstream parties choosing dismissive strategies on the democracy issue: They talk less about democracy and do not change their position on it. This paper contributes to our understanding of how radical-right parties shape party competition and the discourse on democracy.