Does the Side of the Iron Curtain Matter for Foreign Policy? Exploring the Positions of Far-Right Parties from Western and Central-Eastern Europe on Global Affairs, Security, and Defense.

Far-right parties are on the rise in many European countries, with the results of the 2024 European Parliament elections evidencing a trend that shows no signs of slowing down. While research on this party family is expanding, studies exploring their positions on foreign policy remain limited. Yet, with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing war in Gaza, as well as the incumbent Trump administration’s affinity with isolationism, and the calls to restore European strategic autonomy, foreign and defence policies are once again at the forefront of political debates in Europe. Literature suggests that far-right parties articulate foreign policy according to their nativist, populist, and authoritarian ideological features (Wojczewski, 2024), yet this shared ideology does not yield uniform positions. To explain these divergences, scholars increasingly distinguish between radical-right and extreme-right actors, arguing that varying levels of anti-system sentiment drive contrasting approaches to the EU’s role as a foreign policy actor and the transatlantic alliance (Mudde, 2019; Wondreys, 2025). Beyond this structural divide, parties also differ in the hierarchy of their foreign policy concerns. For some, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict holds greater salience than the war in Ukraine, while others prioritize the containment of Russia. This heterogeneity results in ambiguous defence policies: while most parties initially supported military aid to Ukraine (Vignoli, 2022), significant fractures have since emerged, with actors like Italy’s Lega pivoting towards calls for diplomatic negotiations (Coticchia & Vignoli, 2024). This paper addresses this gap by tackling two main questions: First, what positions do European far-right parties display on major global conflicts, security, and defence policies? Second, what are the drivers of these positions? The paper employs a qualitative methods and comparative approach, examining far-right parties in four countries: Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Romania. These cases were selected to determine whether the regional context, specifically Western versus Central-Eastern Europe, influences party positions on security and defence. Furthermore, the selection accounts for variation in relationship to power: far-right parties are currently governing in Italy, are no longer in government in the Netherlands and Poland, and have never held office in Romania. The study relies on a qualitative analysis of primary sources originating from the parties themselves, such as electoral programmes and press releases, as well as public statements from prominent party figures.