By Anton Shekhovtsov,

 

VIENNA, 18 June. - (ANA) - Next year, several EU countries representing more than half of the EU population are due to hold national elections by direct popular vote: Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, and Spain.

 

Considering today’s geopolitical upheavals and recalibrations of the international alliances, it would hardly be an exaggeration to assume that foreign interference will mark the conduct of the elections in all of the above-mentioned countries.

 

Seen from this point of view, the 2027 elections in the EU will become a stress test for the EU initiatives to counter foreign political meddling.

 

In recent years, Brussels recognised several countries as sources of foreign interference in political processes in the EU – Russia, China, Azerbaijan, Iran, and North Korea – but the EU’s flagship project that explores so-called “Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference” (FIMI), EUvsDisinfo, prominently lists only two “threat actors” – Russia and China.

 

Russia has indeed been involved in information warfare against the EU, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 trying to reduce Western support for Ukraine and sabotage Western unity.

 

China, too, has tried to influence politics in the EU, predominantly to undermine common European positions on Taiwan, Uyghurs, Chinese investments, etc. However, unlike Russia, which has bet on political disruption to leverage its malign influence, China aims to prove its responsibility as a political and economic partner and prefers to develop friendly relations with European politicians, business leaders, and academics.

 

In the past, that was Moscow’s influence strategy as well – with former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder being the Kremlin’s highest-ranking trophy – but it is European far-right parties that eventually became the favourite political beneficiaries of Russian information warfare.

 

 

 

 

However, developments over the last two years suggest that malign influence through European far-right parties has a new actor, the US, which the EU seems to have difficulty flagging in the same direct way it flags Russia’s interference.

 

Last year’s US National Security Strategy (NSS) warned of the “stark prospect of civilisational erasure”, determined Washington’s goal “to help Europe correct its current trajectory”, and openly welcomed “the growing influence of patriotic [read: far-right] European parties”, apparently seen as US allies in this ‘corrective’ endeavour.

 

The US State Department has already taken its first steps towards what the NSS termed “cultivating resistance” to the EU’s alleged trajectory of “civilisational erasure”.

 

Sarah B. Rogers, US under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, toured Europe at the beginning of this year to identify rightwing organisations that could potentially be recipients of US funding to implement Washington’s strategy to influence European politics from inside.

 

This funding, which needs to be allocated by September this year, will most likely be overseen by the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, whose deputy assistant secretary, Samuel Samson, has also visited, in 2025-2026, several European countries to explore possible rightwing contacts.   - (ANA) -

 

AB/ANA/18 June 2026 - - -