Agents of Disruption or Continuity? Assessing the Impact of the Rise of the Far-Right in the European Parliament on EU Policy Development in Security and Defence

Far-right parties are on the rise in the Western world. The results of the 2024 European Parliament elections and the re-election of Donald Trump at the White House at the end of the same year are evidence of a trend that does not seem to slow down. In particular, for the first time in history, in the current legislature, the European Parliament finds itself with a leading rightwing majority. A key question thus now concerns whether this new composition of the political environment in the EP has brought dramatic changes in the processes of policy formulation at the EU level in different policy domains. After the start of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, one of the most salient and sensitive policy domains has become that of security and defence, with a heated ongoing discussion on the future of further EU integration in these domains. In general, when far-right parties come into power in a liberal democracy, they try to move the country towards an illiberal direction (Mudde, 2019) by developing, reforming, and implementing policies and laws that eventually come to subvert the domestic liberal democratic order (Pirro & Stanley, 2018). Regarding foreign policy, it has been suggested that the coming into power of far-right parties in many countries did not necessarily alter the policy development for cooperation within the transatlantic alliance (Becker & Mellon, 2023) or did not have a significant influence on policy activities for development initiatives (Bergmann, Hackenesch, & Stockemer, 2021). Furthermore, regarding military support, while most parties initially supported military aid to Ukraine (Vignoli, 2022), some of them started to diverge from this support while calling for more efforts on diplomacy (Coticchia & Vignoli, 2024). Nonetheless, the question of the influence of far-right parties on the formulation of security and defence policies, especially at the EU level, remains unclear. My paper proposes to contribute to this gap by providing a solid contribution to the study of far-right parties and their influence on foreign policy. The paper builds on a qualitative methodology that triangulates interviews with public secondary and primary sources. In particular, the work relies on the employment of interviews with EU officials and civil servants working in the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the European External Action Service, in order to retrieve insights on how the new political composition of the EP affected the process of EU policy formulation on issues related to security, defence, and EU integration, compared to previous EP legislatures. Secondly, the work triangulates this data with further data on the positions that far-right parties express on foreign policy issues, in the form of press releases, electoral programmes and public statements, in order to give a more holistic picture of the influence of their ideology on EU policy development in these domains.