Stefano Braghiroli

• Doctorate in Comparative and European Politics
• Professor (Associate) at University of Tartu

Over the last decade, the European Union has faced multiple crises that have affected the direction and the nature of the integration process. This study focuses on the challenges posed by the Belarusian-EU border crisis (2021) and the proposed travel restrictions towards Russian citizens (2022) in the context of the Nordic-Baltic EU member states....

Over the last decade, a number of non-mainstream European parties have cultivated friendly and mutually advantageous relations with the Russian political establishment. This phenomenon has been common to both the national conservative right and the radical left. This article critically discusses these parties' adaptation to the new political contex...

This Forum focuses on a variety of discourses that in one way or another "understand" and normalize the logic of Putin's war against Ukraine. These discourses have different epistemologies-some of them might simply reproduce Russian propagandistic cliches, while others are embedded in-and adjusted to-specific national contexts; some of them emanate...

U-turns by populist parties are not a new phenomenon. The 2021 electoral campaign in Estonia was marked by episodes that combined cultural hybridity and political opportunism. The nationalist Conservative People's Party of Estonia (EKRE) was reprimanded by the Language Inspectorate for using Russian-language campaign posters with no Estonian transl...

Despite its tangible role in shaping the European Union’s response to the global pandemic, observers seem to have systematically disregarded the role of the European Parliament (EP) in the crisis, by primarily focusing their attention on the European capitals, the inter-governmental institutions, and the coordinating role of the European Commission...

Digitalization has increasingly affected higher education over the past decade. This trend was abruptly and expo- nentially accelerated on a global scale by the COVID-19 pandemic and its direct and indirect consequences for teaching and learning. E-learning is no longer a choice, but a necessity. In this short piece, we briefly discuss some of the...

The article explores party-based populist and radical right looking at the cases of Latvia's National Alliance (NA) and of the Estonian Conservative People's Party (EKRE). The research question is: How does the intersection between the specificities of party-systems and particularistic identity-politics either facilitate or complicate the political...

Charles de Gaulle es uno de los iconos políticos más relevantes de la política francesa, europea e internacional del siglo XX. Su influencia sobre Francia es esencial para comprender los fundamentos de la actual república francesa, en las Comunidades Europeas su liderazgo político fue indiscutible durante años y a nivel internacional su poder efect...

This article uses approaches embedded in practical and popular geopolitics for analysing how Russia capitalizes on the refugee crisis to redefine Europe. Two of Russia’s European policies are at the centre of this analysis: 1) Moscow’s direct appeal to Russian-speaking communities, and 2) the Kremlin’s liaisons with Eurosceptic parties of national...

The financial and debt crisis caused severe economic and political instability in Italy. Economic hardship led to an array of unpopular policy measures, giving rise to public dissatisfaction and civil unrest. These dramatic developments call for a re-assessment of the basic link between the economy and political support. This article uses the Europ...

The impact of crisis in Ukraine on EU–Russia relations appears twofold. On the one hand, it revealed the high degree of disdain all across Europe to Moscow's neo-imperial approach. On the other hand, it unveiled a great deal of affection and sympathy to Kremlin's policy among a number of non-mainstream but significant groups within the EU. In this...

The euro crisis is increasingly affecting the political debate in the European Union. Exogenously determined power shifts and institutional changes have been imposed on a number of member states. These measures and the direct intervention of external stakeholders in the key realms of domestic politics pose a serious challenge to both the EU's cohes...

Although both the European Union (EU) and Russia seem to be increasingly aware of the necessity to cooperate, their relationship is still marked by diplomatic ambivalence and lack of trust. In spite of the growing institutional role and greater activism of the European Parliament (EP) in the field of external relations, EU–Russia relationships have...

The spillover of the Arab Spring is often attributed to the increased use of the Internet and various social networks. In addition, many established democracies and international organizations have adopted democracy promotion as their foreign policy objectives. Heads of states regularly praise democracy and reiterate their commitment to its promoti...

this article examines the way in which the Members of the European Parliament (meps) frame Turkey and how this affects their voting stance towards Ankara in the parliamentary debates. Recent studies (Baldwin andWidgrén 2005; Braghiroli 2012; Canan-Sokullu 2011) have demonstrated that the debate on Turkey’s European Union (eu) membership produces a...

The article looks at the way the debate on Turkish membership has developed in the Sixth European Parliament (EP). First, it analyses the impact of the debate on Turkey on the voting dynamics in the assembly. Second, it assesses how and to what extent Euro-parliamentarians’ individual view of Turkey and Turkish membership influence their actual vot...

This article explores Russia's impact upon the cohesion of the European Union International Society (EUIS). The analysis proceeds from a systematic categorisation of Member States' positions towards Russia, using an ''index of friendliness towards Russia'' based on various indicators. This index allows us to analyse the relative positions of Member...

Looking through a chronology of 2010, it is objectively difficult to find one event that brings the two center-left parties represented in Parliament into the center of the Italian political debate as leading players. In spite of the obvious and growing difficulties for the government majority—with Silvio Berlusconi’s leadership looking seriously s...

Two criminal events committed in 2007 by Romanian nationals in Italy triggered tensioned relationships between the two countries. The contemporary use of populist rhetoric in the Italian political debate contrasts sharply with the pre-2007 supportive discourses towards the Romanian accession to the EU. Such positive attitudes of the elite were driv...

Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic growth of internet-based communication. This phenomenon and its still partially unexplored potential have increasingly attracted the attention of a growing number of political entrepreneurs. This paper analyses to what extent it has characterized vertical communication between politicians and voters looking...

This paper systematically looks at the nature of MEPs’ internet-based “web tools” in the past EP legislature and at the extent to which their features reflect the complex nature of the EP environment (“Europeanization of communication”). To conduct this operation, a variety of structural and graphic features of MEPs’ websites have been identified,...

Lithuania is the largest of the three Baltic countries and the one with the smallest Russian minority (5 per cent). It joined the European Union (EU) in 2004, nine years after applying. Due to economic and political instability in the mid-1990s Lithuania, like neighbouring Latvia, was not included in the first round of negotiations. In June 2004, L...

The last decades have witnessed a dramatic growth of internet-based communication. This phenomenon and its still partially unexplored potential have increasingly attracted the attention of a growing number of political entrepreneurs. This paper analyses to what extent it has characterised vertical communication between politicians and voters lookin...

In the last decade the massive use of new interactive technologies has increasingly characterized horizontal political competition (among the elites) and vertical political communication (between elites and voters) towards greater 'personalization of politics'. In particular, candidates’ personal websites have become the rule in many political envi...

Democracy and civic involvement are core values of contemporary Europe. To what extent do citizens’ attitudes relate with democratization, a process in which half of the continent was involved in recent years? By examining 16 post-Communist countries in their transition process until 1998, this article reveals that the level of political culture an...

This paper intends to offer an analysis of Member States (MS) positions towards Russia, as influenced by the strength of economic flows, energy dependence, preferences for projects of regional security, existence of disputes and projects of energy supply. On this basis, an index of likelihood of "friendliness towards Russia", is here presented. Thi...

1 This article aims at highlighting the dynamics which determined the process of disgregation of Czechoslovakia from a comparative perspective, adopting the Belgian process of State decentralization as a functional interpretative lens. This work represents the first attempt to tackle this issue from a comparative perspective, beyond the boundaries...