For years, a global chorus of right-wing politicians has praised Vladimir Putin. They see the Russian strongman as a champion of closed borders, Christian conservatism and bare-chested machismo in an era of progressive politics and Western globalization. Admiring him was a central part of the populist playbook.
But Putin’s aggression on Ukraine, which many of his supporters said he would never do, projected a clearer image of the Russian president as a global risk, a specter with imperial ambitions that threatens to wage nuclear war and provoke instability in Europe.
For many of his former admirers – from France to Germany and from the US to Brazil – it is a somewhat uncomfortable position. The taint of Putin’s newfound reputation threatens to touch his fellow travelers as well. “It will be a decisive blow to them,” said Lucio Caracciolo, editor of the Italian geopolitical magazine Limes, who called Putin’s invasion of Ukraine an irrational and potentially suicidal move.
He said members of the international far-right who enjoyed a special relationship and financial support from Putin were “in serious trouble”. “They put all their eggs in one basket,” Caracciolo said. “And the basket is falling apart.”
Perhaps no one better demonstrates this dilemma than Senator Matteo Salvini, Italy’s top right-wing politician in the Northern League, who has been a staunch supporter of Putin.
He wore shirts with the Russian’s face on Red Square in Moscow and at the European Parliament. He said he preferred the Russian president to the Italian and incessantly repeated Putin’s calls to end sanctions already imposed on Russia for its annexation of Crimea. He mocked those who denounced that he was in the Russian president’s pocket, saying, “I cherish him for free, not for money.”
Like some other right-wing leaders, he is now trying to defuse the situation by condemning the violence, or even Russia, but not Putin by name, and making excuses for it with arguments against NATO. (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). While some of his colleagues have admitted that they may have misjudged the Russian president, Salvini is not ready to make such a concession.
On Thursday (24), he wrote on Twitter that he strongly condemns “any military aggression” and then left flowers at the Ukrainian embassy. He has come to recognize that Russia is a military aggressor, but he still seems to have difficulty making criticisms and mentioning Putin in the same sentence. “I am disappointed in the human being who, in 2022, tries to solve economic and political problems with war,” Salvini said in a radio interview. (Salvini’s spokesman, Matteo Pandini, insisted that he also claimed that “Putin started a war and so he’s wrong”, but could not pinpoint where he said this.)
The Italian is among European leaders who are now struggling to link former support for Putin with the war he has decided to wage. The cast of former Putin apologists who are now writhing with apologies looks like something of an encyclopedia of 2018’s populist rise.
In France, the war provoked a politically painful and possibly costly turnaround ahead of April’s presidential elections. Far-right candidates who spent years praising the Russian leader and weeks downplaying the risk of invasion reassessed Putin and the advantage of siding with him.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Regroupment party – which received a loan from a Russian bank – declared that Russia’s annexation of Crimea was not illegal and visited Putin in Moscow before the last presidential elections in 2017. Le Pen denounced it. Putin’s military aggression on Friday (25): “What he did is completely reprehensible. It partly changes my opinion of him.”
His far-right rival in the presidential campaign, Éric Zemmour, has in the past called the prospect of a French counterpart to Putin a “dream” and admired the Russian’s efforts to restore “an empire in decline”. Like many other Putin enthusiasts, he doubted an invasion was in the cards and blamed the United States for spreading what he called “propaganda”.
But on Thursday, Zemmour denounced the invasion, saying that “Russia was not attacked or directly threatened by Ukraine,” in a speech delivered from a pulpit that, to make things clear, carried a plaque with the sentence: “I totally condemn the Russian military intervention in Ukraine”.
In the UK, Nigel Farage, one of the main supporters of Brexit, did not believe that Russia would invade Ukraine. “Well I was wrong,” he wrote on Twitter on Thursday, although he maintained that the European Union and NATO had unnecessarily provoked Russia’s expansion.
“Putin has gone a lot further than I thought he would.”
Other right-wing forces across Europe have tried to hit the target by condemning the violence but denying Putin the blame. Alexander Gauland, a key figure in the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, told the Neuer Osnabrucker Zeitung on Thursday that the invasion was “the result of past failures” and blamed the expansion. eastward after the Cold War for violating “Russia’s legitimate security interests”. Putin has been most popular in the formerly communist-ruled eastern part of Germany, where the AfD has its political base.
Putin’s supporters are not only found in Europe. In the United States, former President Donald Trump, whose tenure was marked by a request to the Russian leader that confused his Western allies, said on Wednesday that Putin was “very perceptive” and took a “genius” move in declaring regions of the Ukraine independent states as a predicate to advance with the Russian armed forces.
The last prominent leader to visit Putin before the war, President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) of Brazil, whom Putin once said expressed “the best masculine qualities”, decided at this point to hold his tongue. Perhaps he stated his position when he reprimanded his vice president for saying that Brazil was opposed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
But Putin’s old friends are perhaps the most shocked by the attack.
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s former prime minister who wore furry hats with the Russian at his country home in Sochi and was given a “big bed” by Putin as a gift, condemned the violence but said nothing publicly about his old friend. It is unclear whether he approached Putin, but apparently told his party members that he would put his international relations at the service of defending Europe.
“I spoke to Berlusconi last night. He is very worried and almost terrified by what is happening,” Giorgio Mulè, undersecretary of defense for Berlusconi’s party, told Italian radio on Friday. “He just doesn’t see in Vladimir Putin the person he used to know,” he added.
