‘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 understand better how European parties react towards aggressions by anti-liberal authoritarian states. In this article, we focus on the still relatively understudied yet crucial case of the radical left. Since our initial quantitative overview shows that there is no united front on positions of radical left parties towards Russia’s actions, we argue for the necessity of a deeper analysis of radical left strategies. A similar empirical analysis, however, is lacking. To fill this gap, we provide a qualitative content analysis of the reactions to Russia’s 2022 aggression on Ukraine from different ideological sub-types of radical left parties from the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Portugal. We conclude that there is a clear heterogeneity in the way the radical left approaches the invasion of Ukraine, which, albeit not perfectly, corresponds with ideological and strategic sub-types within the party family. Therefore, it makes little sense to regard the party family as a whole as ‘pro-Russian’. The findings invite further comparative studies on varying reactions to Russia’s aggressions within and across particular party families.