The Italian elections of September 2022 represented a watershed moment for the country, as for the first time in the postwar era a far-right government came to power. The new coalition—headed by Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy and joined by both Matteo Salvini’s League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia—drew significant attention for its deeply conservative positions on numerous domestic issues, namely immigration and gender policy. Yet, coming off the heels of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the election results also carried significant geopolitical implications.
The Italian electorate reacted negatively to the Russian invasion, overwhelmingly supporting plans to welcome Ukrainian refugees, and the previous Italian government under Mario Draghi had joined other NATO members in supporting Ukraine. Regardless, it remained uncertain if this policy would be continued with the same vigor under the new government. While Meloni herself was adamant about her support for the war effort, comments made by members of her coalition indicated that there was no guarantee that Italian geostrategy would remain static.
However, these concerns were quickly proved to be unfounded. From its first days in office, the Meloni government adopted a firmly Atlanticist stance and became one of the most vocal and strident advocates of NATO’s support for Ukraine. Furthermore, Meloni herself devoted considerable effort to portraying Italy as one of the U.S.’s most unwavering allies and urging greater EU cooperation on defense—even as these efforts came at the expense of weaker ties to Russia.
In fact, as Figure 1 illustrates, data obtained in June of 2023 by the Special Edition Chapel Hill Expert Survey on Ukraine shows that the Brothers of Italy was among the cluster of parties that strongly supported sending arms to Ukraine, accepting refugees, diminishing energy ties with Russia, and had among the lowest ties to the Kremlin. Conversely, both the League and Forza Italia appeared in the opposite cluster along with the populist technocratic Five Star Movement and left-wing Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra.
Figure 1: Stance of Italian Parties on Issues Relating to Ukraine and Russia
While consistent with the pre-election government’s stance, this staunch Atlanticism displayed by the far right is surprising. The Italian far right has for many years displayed a clear Russophilia—most notably demonstrated by the personal affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin frequently expressed by Meloni’s coalition partners, Salvini and Berlusconi. Thus, this rapid about-face required significant discursive maneuvering to accomplish with minimal backlash from both the electorate and the coalition’s junior partners.
Furthermore, the shift challenged Italy’s longstanding foreign policy status quo. During and after the Cold War, Italy under both right- and left-leaning governments sought to adopt the role of a “middle power” capable of simultaneously forming links with the United States and Russia—a role that it even maintained during previous episodes of Russian aggression, such as the 2008 invasion of Georgia and the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Given that geopolitics is not the far right’s traditional policy strength, the Italian far right’s acute shift away from Russia was certainly noteworthy.
Data and Methods
To better understand how Italian far-right parties and leaders articulate their geopolitical stances, we examined the “everyday” discourse contained in their tweets. As opposed to the formal communications expressed in party manifestos, parliamentary speeches, and official interviews, tweets provide a glimpse into the frequency with which far-right actors raise geopolitical issues of their own accord—and how they frame such issues when they do address them.
Our analysis focused on the two most electorally successful far-right parties in Italy—the Brothers of Italy and the League—and their leaders—Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini. The dataset included 436,366 tweets issued between January 1, 2013, and December 31, 2021, by these leaders and parties.
While other scholars have studied how these actors responded after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, we limited our analysis to the decade before the current conflict for several reasons.
First, the period under study provides a longer timeframe in which to understand these actors’ “typical” geopolitical discourse, which may have changed substantially in the shorter period since the start of the war.
Second, these parties and leaders have been at the helm of the Italian government for most of the duration of the current war, which likely constrains how they communicate about geopolitical matters. By contrast, they were not in government for most of the timeframe explored in this study, suggesting they had more room to maneuver when articulating their geopolitical stances.
Third, as previously noted, these parties have displayed relatively consistent support for Ukraine over the past several years—by studying the period prior to the current conflict, we can better understand how these parties arrived at their current position and to what extent it is consistent or inconsistent with their previously articulated views.
Given the large quantity of data, we first used quantitative text analysis techniques to code and analyze the tweets. We began by employing a dictionary approach to identify tweets related to geopolitical relations with both the United States and NATO (the “West”) and Russia. We developed the dictionaries to include keywords that explicitly referenced the United States, Russia, their leaders, and their capitals; the “West” dictionary also included terms relating to NATO or the Atlantic Alliance. One challenge that emerged in this process related to the polyvalence of certain keywords. For example, the Italian word “nato” can mean “NATO” or “born.” To disambiguate the use of such polyvalent terms, we manually inspected the tweets that included at least one keyword from our dictionaries and removed those that contained anomalous uses. This resulted in a smaller dataset of 3,298 tweets related to geopolitics.
As others have found, the far right historically has not made geopolitics a primary point of its policy ambitions. Therefore, we expect the far right’s geopolitical discourse will be infrequent (H1).
When it does address geopolitical issues, the Italian far right often walks a tightrope between leveraging Russophilia as an ideational resource to promote conservative values and national sovereignty, while simultaneously maintaining ties to the Western and European order. These alternatives are not mutually exclusive, although in recent years the League has demonstrated a stronger affinity for Russia, while FdI’s commitments have leaned more toward the West. Thus, we expect the League’s discourse about Russia will be more frequent than its discourse about the West (H2A). Furthermore, FdI’s discourse about the West will be more frequent than its discourse about Russia (H2B).
The notable Russophilia expressed by Salvini and Meloni’s unwavering Atlanticism also point toward inter-party differences. Specifically, the League’s discourse about Russia will be more frequent than FdI’s Russia discourse (H3A); by contrast, FdI’s discourse about the West will be more frequent than the League’s West discourse (H3B).
Furthermore, as geopolitics is not among the far right’s core issues, we expect their discourse on these topics to arise more often as a reaction to political news and events, rather than as a proactive attempt to generate a debate about international politics. Therefore, spikes in the League’s and FdI’s geopolitical discourse will be linked to major events (H4).
Results
As is widely discussed in the literature, geopolitical issues are not the far right’s traditional areas of emphasis—and this was borne out in our data. In support of H1, we found that fewer than one percent of each party’s tweets from 2013–21 addressed issues related to geopolitics. As illustrated in Figure 2, discussions of the West were significantly more common for both parties than mentions of Russia. For the Brothers of Italy, tweets about the West were 179 percent more frequent than those about Russia (p<0.001), while for the League there was an 83 percent difference (p<0.001). This provides support for H2B but contradicts the expectations of H2A.
Furthermore, the figure reveals that the League tweeted about geopolitics much more frequently than Brothers of Italy; in support of H3A, its tweets about Russia were 161 percent higher (p<0.001) than FdI’s Russia-oriented tweets. However, opposed to H3B, the League’s mentions of the West were also 71 percent higher (p<0.001) than FdI’s. These findings also challenge the conventional wisdom that Russophilia is the predominant expression of geopolitics on the far right. While Russia certainly plays a key role in the far right’s discursive and ideational repertoire—it does not appear to be a more common topic of discussion than the West in the far right’s everyday discourse.
Figure 2: Frequency of Geopolitical Discourse in FdI and League Tweets, 2013–21
To better gauge the contexts in which the Italian far right does discuss geopolitical issues, we qualitatively analyzed tweets during months in which geopolitical discourse was higher than usual (measured as one standard deviation above the mean). Figure 3 displays the percentage of tweets each month related to geopolitics—with the dotted line representing the threshold for a “high” frequency of geopolitical discourse and with dark shading indicating months above this level.
Turning first to the top panel of the figure, an average of only 0.58 percent of FdI tweets per month mentioned geopolitics—with only seven months exceeding one standard deviation above this level (1.59 percent). In six of those seven months, FdI’s geopolitical discourse was clearly motivated as a reaction to pressing events. For example, in October 2014 it voiced its opposition to the renewal of sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Crimea earlier that year. Likewise, the party responded enthusiastically to Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president in November 2016 and his inauguration in January 2017. The single month that defies this pattern is March 2019, when Meloni traveled to Washington, DC, to participate in the Conservative Political Action Conference. During that month, the party’s tweets publicized her trip and promoted her ties to Trump and the Republican Party. Yet overall, this evidence provides relatively strong support for H4, as FdI tended to avoid promoting its geopolitical positions unless required to do so by salient political news and events.
Figure 3: Frequency of Italian Far-Right Geopolitical Discourse by Month, 2013–21
Nevertheless, as illustrated in the bottom panel of Figure 3, the League was much more comfortable incorporating geopolitics into its normal discourse, even when not pushed to do so by external events. An average of 1 percent of the party’s monthly tweets dealt with geopolitics—and 18 months crossed the threshold for a “high” level of such discourse (2.22 percent). In five of those 18 months, the League’s geopolitical discourse was mostly catalyzed by news and events. In addition to following FdI in voicing its opposition to the renewal of Russian sanctions and support for Trump’s election, the party also responded to events including Turkey’s downing of a Russian military aircraft on November 24, 2015; the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016; and the St. Petersburg metro bombing on April 3, 2017.
However, an additional six months saw discourse focused on promoting League leader Matteo Salvini’s geopolitical activities, rather than reacting to events. These included several trips Salvini took to Moscow, including his visit in March 2017 to sign a cooperation agreement with Putin’s United Russia party, as well as his trip to Washington, DC, in June 2019. Furthermore, the remaining seven months with a high frequency of geopolitical discourse saw the party use geopolitical topics to reinforce its positions on domestic issues, such as terrorism and immigration. For example, the party regularly cited Trump when pushing its anti-immigration agenda, as when it tweeted: “Stop Islamic refugees, two in three Italians are with Trump” and “On immigration, 56% of Italians think like Trump.” Likewise, it often cited Putin’s actions against ISIS when discussing domestic security and immigration, as when the party tweeted: “#Salvini: I esteem and respect Putin. If he hadn’t gone after ISIS, we would have them in our homes. Sanctions against Russia? Madness.” Thus, the League’s geopolitical discourse does not fully conform to the expectations of H4, with only one-third of the party’s high-frequency months focused on reacting to pressing geopolitical events.
Conclusion
As the far right continues to gain ground across Europe, understanding its geopolitical stance becomes ever more important. Critically, we found that the far right’s discussion of geopolitics is often motivated as a reaction to pressing news and events, rather than as a proactive attempt to initiate a debate. This was most acutely the case for FdI, which generally only addressed prominent events that required a response. By contrast, the League more frequently initiated discussions of geopolitics of its own accord, particularly to promote party leader Salvini’s trips to Russia. Therefore, the Italian far right was able to reframe itself quickly after the start of the war, as it had only minimally tied itself to the issue before.
Future research should build on these findings to further improve our understanding of geopolitics on the far right. One important avenue for additional research is how actors on the extraparliamentary far right articulate their positions on foreign policy and act on them. For example, recent research has found that members of the Italian CasaPound and Forza Nuova have become directly involved in the fighting in Ukraine on both sides—so further understanding the role these organizations play in the far-right environment is of increasing importance. Furthermore, broadening the scope beyond Italy to include the far right across Europe stands to determine to what extent the findings presented here are representative of the party family overall or unique to the Italian context.
As the far right in Italy and around Europe reaches unprecedented levels of electoral success, understanding its positions on geopolitical issues has become increasingly urgent. While not traditionally part of this party family’s set of core issues, their increasing access to political power makes it all the more vital for scholars to understand how these actors understand geopolitics and how their recent ascendency stands to change it.
Joseph Cerrone is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at George Washington University and an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University. His research agenda is broadly focused on questions of democratic decline and renewal, with a specific focus on the rise of the far right, political discourse, anti-immigration politics, and electoral reform.
Erik Piccoli is a Research Assistant for the Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University. He has published in National Identities journal, National Interest, and at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies.
Photo by John Chrobak made using “Italian Army – 8th Alpini Regiment VTML Lince platoon during a training exercise in Friuli December 2022” by Italian Army www.esercito.difesa.it, licensed under CC BY 2.5; “Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council Roundtable (Transport) 28681/195938” by European Union, © European Union, 1998 – 2025; “EPP Summit, 20 June 2019 Brussels” by European People’s Party, licensed under CC BY 2.0; “Prime Minister Keir Starmer meets Italys Giorgia Meloni” by Number 10, licensed under Open Government Licence v3.0.
