A divorce of convenience: exploring radical right populist parties’ position on Putin’s Russia within the context of the Ukrainian war. A social media perspective

ABSTRACT Over the last decade there has been a growing convergence between Putin’s Russia and West European right-wing populist parties (WERPPs) that are growing in consensus around Europe. Such relationship, depicted as “marriage of convenience”, benefits both Putin in his quest for the international legitimization of his political regime and WERPPs in their rally for power at both the national and the European levels. Grounded on a mix of populism, opposition to the European Union and radical right-wing ideology, does this marriage survive the Ukrainian crisis or does it transform itself in a “divorce of convenience”? This work uses an original dataset of more than 900k tweets collected in the period between 2013 and 2022 and produced by two Italian populist parties and shows what shapes WERPPs’ communication about Russia. Moreover, it empirically demonstrates how fragile, mutable and exposed to the influence of contextual factors this relationship is.