A wide variety of linguistic means is being used to construe the alien or foreign »other«. The Discourse-Historical Approach of Critical Discourse Analysis combines the in-depth analysis of linguistic utterances with a systematic analysis of their context. We apply this approach for the study of examples from recent election campaigns – the Graz municipal election 2008 and the Austrian EU election 2009. In this article we focus on linguistic as well as visual forms of communication, which combine text and images. The analysis of open and implicit constructions of excluding (segregating) statements documents the presence of xenophobic rhetoric not only on the right margins of the political spectrum, but also in the political centre.