‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’? European radical left parties’ response to Russia’s war in Ukraine

The 2022 Russian (re)invasion of Ukraine highlights the need to better understand how European parties react towards aggressions by anti-liberal authoritarian states. In this paper we focus on the still relatively understudied yet crucial case of the radical left. Exploring the positions of different radical left parties towards Russian aggression(s) is important to more fully understand how radical actors attempt to influence socio-political conflicts and public debates. In order to fill these gaps, we proceed in two steps. First, to investigate how radical left parties react to Russian aggression(s) compared with other parties, we analyze the roll-call votes in the European Parliament on resolutions condemning Russia’s actions from the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 to the (re)invasion in 2022. Second, to look deeper into radical left strategies, we narrow down our analysis to seven radical left parties from the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Portugal. The selected cases reflect different ideological sub-types within the radical left party family, as well as different geo-political contexts in which these parties operate. We expect that in broader comparison radical left parties will be less disapproving of Russia than other parties. Yet, given the heterogeneity within the radical left party family, we also anticipate that specific reactions will differ across cases. Hence, contrary to conventional wisdom, we assume that there will be no ‘united front’ in the way the radical left approaches the (re)invasion of Ukraine and the Kremlin’s politics as such.