The EU and the Russo-Ukrainian conflict through the lenses of right wing populist parties, in the case of Italy

How do right wing populist parties frame Europe/the EU in relation to the Russo-Ukrainian crisis? Previous investigations in the field have assessed the mutable relationship between West European Populist parties (WERPPs) and Putin’s Russia (Carlotti 2023). Indeed, it generally moves from a strong endorsement of Putin in the pre-conflict period to a distance in the period immediately after the burst of the conflict in 2022. Is this transformation to be observed also with regard to the European Union. In other words, do WERPPs move from a rejection of the EU action in the Russo-Ukrainian relationship to an endorsement of it immediately after the burst of the conflict? Building on literature on Euroscepticism, populism and radical right political parties, this work relies on both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis used on a dataset of more than 900k tweets collected in the period between 2013 and 2022 and produced by two Italian populist parties (the League and Brothers of Italy). The core objective is to spot the presence of eventual changes in their discourse about the EU, describe them and delineate some potential explanation for their presence.