Alberto Miraglia
Far-right parties are gaining increasingly more importance considering their constant rise in electoral consensus and their increasing presence in national parliaments and governments. While research on this party family in Europe has been extensive in recent times and it is growing, a substantial focus on their foreign policy positions is still missing, and furthermore, the international environment is characterized by a moment of crisis and military tension, and this has led all political parties to develop clear positions for what concerns matters of security and defense. The research project seeks to contribute to this gap, as it aims to study and understand the ideological traits of far-right parties in Europe in the domain of foreign policy, and in particular their positions vis-à-vis the military conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine. The research work proposes a framework to study foreign policy ideology, divided into two dimensions: an institutional dimension that accounts for the political stance of far-right parties vis-à-vis international institutions such as the European Union and NATO, and a dimension focused on military conflicts, that investigates on the one hand what policies these parties support in matters of security and defense, and what are their perceptions of the countries involved in the military conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine.
The research proposes to draw these conclusions following a qualitative-based empirical observation and a case-study approach. In particular, the work will follow an in-depth observation of three far-right parties in Europe, namely Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) from Italy, Rassemblement National (RN), from France, and Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS), from Poland. The study aims to analyze the political activity of these parties both at the national and European levels, by focusing on their activity in national parliaments and the European Parliament respectively, and by relying on party literature and elite interviews as the main sources for data collection.