The Rhetorics of Zeitenwende: Legitimising Support for Ukraine in Parliamentary Debates

This paper examines the impact of \textit{Zeitenwende} on Germany's foreign policy toward Ukraine following the Russian invasion in February 2022. It argues that recent shifts in Germany's assertive foreign policy constitute a significant departure from long-held public expectations, prompting political actors to employ various legitimation narratives to justify these changes. Utilizing a dataset of speeches from the German Bundestag, the study employs computational text analysis, including seeded LLMs to identify and analyze the legitimation frames used by political parties and transformer models to detect emotions in the debates. While findings reveal that pro-Ukrainian legitimation frames correlate with legislative support, the emotional tenor of these narratives shows limited influence on decision-making. This research contributes to the fields of International Relations and parliamentary studies by linking foreign policy analysis with the dynamics of rhetorical legitimation and coercion, offering insights into the evolving landscape of German security policy.