A quiet convergence: The 2022 full‐scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and Italian Parties' positions on the European Union

We investigate the impact of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on domesticparty competition over the European Union (EU) in its immediate aftermath, witha focus on the case of Italy. Drawing on a discursive neo-functionalist frame-work, we perform OLS regression analysis on a dataset of more than 10,000Facebook posts retrieved via CrowdTangle. Our findings show that Italian par-ties converged towards supportive EU positions following the full-scale Russianinvasion due to a decrease in anti-EU claims. Furthermore, the degree of con-vergence of individual parties varied depending on their ideological orientation.While extreme left-wing and green parties significantly decreased their discur-sive opposition to the EU, anti-Europeanism did not abate in radical right parties,which remained consistent in their Eurosceptic stances throughout the analysedtimeframe. Compared to COVID-19, the different surrounding international con-text and policy fields involved in this crisis are associated with different partyreactions vis-à-vis the EU.