The EU doesn’t need Moscow to interfere in its democracy – it has Brussels for that

Instead of trying to pin down Russia as the main threat to democracy, perhaps the bloc’s officials should look in the mirror

The EU superheroes did it, guys. They stopped Russian President Vladimir Putin from being elected to Brussels. And now they’re telling us all about how they did it, before Marvel Studios’ costume department comes knocking on the door of the EU clown tent to ask for their capes back.

The Russians and their “disinformation” didn’t have any impact on the European Elections earlier this year. That’s now the official word from the EU itself.

Vera Jourova, the Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency, has emerged from an Orwellian novel to announce that “based on currently available information, no major information interference operation capable of disrupting the elections was recorded.”

So much for the public freak out that European parliamentarians were having back in April 2024, demanding even more censorship of “Kremlin-backed media outlets” and “disinformation campaigns” in what they qualified as “Kremlin-backed attempts to interfere with and undermine European democratic processes.” 

We’re supposed to believe that it’s all because Jourova had embarked on a crackdown, er, “Democracy Tour” to commiserate not just with election officials and authorities, but also with “civil society” NGOs, industry, and media. Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that there wasn’t really much disinformation to begin with and that they’ve been blowing the issue way out of proportion. 

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Jourova herself acknowledged that even the EU’s Digital Media Observatory was only able to find between 4% to 8% of what they qualify as “disinformation” among all articles analyzed between May 2023 and March 2024, and that the figure climbed to just 15% in May 2024, right before the EU’s June election. 

This means that around EU election time, a whopping 85% of information and analysis floating around in the public domain was EU-approved. Jourova said that “disinformation narratives followed the topics we expected: there were allegations that the elections are rigged, but mostly topics that trigger a strong emotional impact – the war on Ukraine, the Middle East, false narratives on climate change, and migrants.” We used to call those things topics of debate. But that was before they decided that the agendas Brussels was trying to ram down everyone’s throats across the entire bloc wouldn’t be served by messy democratic dissent. Best to just dismiss, marginalize, or censor opposing information and narratives and be forced to deal with being violently mugged by reality later on issues like Ukraine’s not actually “winning,” regardless of how expensive life has become for EU citizens as a result of the bloc’s suicidal pro-Ukraine policies, and migration being an actual five-alarm problem for the EU as it faces the palpable rise of populism backlash for not doing enough earlier. 

And the EU elections are certainly not rigged! The people elect representatives to EU parliament, then a ‘president’ is handpicked behind closed doors and plopped in front of them for a simple yes/no confirmation vote. That person, currently ‘Queen’ Ursula von der Leyen, who has never actually been elected to the EU parliament, then runs a ‘royal’ European Commission of bureaucratic desk jockeys that crafts and dictates policy for the entire bloc. Anyone calling this anything other than a model democratic institution must be a Russian agent. 

A quick trip to the European Digital Media Observatory’s website, and a random click on an article, finds that it qualifies Ukrainian fake news, like the nonsense story about the ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ fighter pilot who was downing Russian jets left and right at the outset of the conflict, as “soft propaganda” necessary to rally Ukrainian troops and allies – unlike Russia’s “hard propaganda.” And what might that be, exactly? The same analysis includes an obviously satirical cartoon caricature of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and points out that, no, Zelensky did not actually emerge as a cartoon from a hole in the streets of Paris with paper money and gold bars flying into his mouth. They even included a photo of the actual “real” Parisian street, before someone photoshopped in the cartoon Zelensky, to prove that Russia was spreading lies. “Sometimes, it requires thinking outside of the box, using geolocation methods or contacting fact-checkers or sources on the field, such as Myth Detector in Georgia, to debunk a fabricated caricature of president Zelensky in Paris,” the intrepid EU fact-checkers say of their work in protecting Europeans from laughing their posterior off, at least until they visit the observatory’s website.

Jourova credited the Democracy Action Plan of 2020, meant to bolster by both “strengthening media freedom” and “countering disinformation.” Nothing says freedom and democracy like institutional powers deciding what information should be free and what should be censored into oblivion.

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The EU is starting to resemble a casino in Las Vegas: the house always wins, regardless of who voters actually send there. And the current establishment status quo is doing everything to ensure the perpetuation of the same system, including defining censorship as necessary to save democracy and freedom as adherence to their agenda. 

Maybe if they chilled out a bit more and loosened their iron grip, then not only would dissent perhaps enable better decisions that would win voter support, but it would also take the wind out of the sails of populist parties who are surging in EU and national elections largely because voters are looking to elect people who are about as far away as possible from the establishment’s current blast radius.

A lot of good all this EU censorship and information meddling did for the establishment’s cause in actual EU voting, though, with anti-establishment parties continuing to make gains. Not quite enough to book the result entirely on Russia quite yet, as the US establishment tried to do when Donald Trump won in 2016. But watch out for what happens in future Western elections, particularly this November in the US. If establishment darling Kamala Harris wins, it’ll be yet another victory for election security. If populist favorite Trump wins, get ready for it to be Russia’s fault. Because they’re looking everywhere for meddling except in the mirror.