Between Institutions and External Relations: Exploring the Drivers of the Foreign Policy Ideology of Far-Right Parties in the European Parliament

The success that the far-right across Europe is enjoying in current times shows no sign of slowing down, and research on this party family is growing extensively. However, studies on what drives the positions of far-right parties on matters of foreign policy are still limited. Far-right parties have been known in the past to have positions in foreign policy such as skeptical towards the EU, and in favor of relations with Russia, but since 2022 it seems that many of these parties have reconsidered their positions towards the EU and are supporting further EU integration in security and defense, while they appear to be split on other issues such as external relations and military policies. This paper seeks to contribute to this gap by providing a solid contribution to the discussion on the foreign policy ideology of the far-right in Europe. The paper employs a mixed-methods research design that examines the political drivers behind the positions that far-right parties expressed in the European Parliament on resolutions on issues of foreign policy in the 9th and 10th legislatures. Foreign policy ideology is operationalized according to an original analytical framework that guided the data collection. Starting from the assumptions that broadening a concept does not lead to any loss of precision (Sartori, 1970) and that unpacking ideology into different dimensions is useful to study the positions of political parties on international issues (Hofmann, 2013), I unpacked foreign policy ideology in two dimensions: Institutions and External Relations. For each dimension, I identified two core issues: the EU and NATO for the first dimension, and the War in Ukraine and the War in the Middle East for the other. Using two datasets built by combining data retrieved from the VoteWatchEU, and the latest versions of the POPPA and CHES datasets, and by scraping recent data on roll-call votes carried out in the European Parliament in the 9th and 10th legislatures, the study identifies whether ideological factors or non-ideological factors can explain how far-right parties vote in the EP on a series of resolutions voted on foreign policy issues. This quantitative analysis performed on the votes is further complemented by a qualitative analysis of secondary sources, such as the transcripts of parliamentary debates from party officials and press releases. The results show that, instead of ideological factors, such as populism and nativism, non-ideological factors are better predictors for the positions expressed by far-right parties on foreign policy issues. Indeed, aspects such as whether a party is in government in their own country, the European region where they are from (Western Europe vs CEE), and the political group of belonging, are strong predictors of why some parties are in favor of EU integration in security and defense, or of their positions on the transatlantic alliance, and the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. This highlights that the European far-right lacks a common foreign policy, and these parties decide their party line in accordance with short-term political strategy.