0 the fact of being very severe, for example in refusing to allow something or to give people what they want:
The government wants to take a hard line against the strikers.
1 extreme and severe and not likely to change:
a hard-line manifesto
a hard-line politician
His hardline stance appears to have gained him greater popularity with the public.
He is a hard-line anti-immigration Republican.
His death leaves a vacuum that could be filled by hard-line nationalists, warlords and terrorists.
He fears losing support in the election to hardline unionists who oppose power sharing.
Maimonides presents a hard line of a different sort concerning responsibility.
He takes a hard line in classifying topasses as distinctly separate from the soldiers generically referred to as sepoys.
Faced with disobedience and violation of the law, states must take a hard line with civil disobedients.
Or rather than a hard line, a band of income within which the correlation is increasingly weak.