Last month, the European Commission suspended broadcasts through 4 media outlets that it claimed to “propagate Russian propaganda and the war of aggression against Ukraine”.
A week later, it froze the assets of one such media outlet, Voice of Europe, and sanctioned its owner, Viktor Medvedchuk, a former Ukrainian lawmaker who now lives in Russia.
The Czech Republic, where the Voice of Europe is based, sanctioned Medvedchuk and the Voice of Europe last March. Shortly after, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo claimed that Russia paid members of the European Parliament (MEP) to make propaganda in Europe.
The moves are the latest by the European Union to protect its data area from alleged Russian influence ahead of European Parliament elections on Thursday and Friday, in which right-wing parties close to Moscow are expected to make significant gains.
The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) predicted in January that far-right parties would overtake classic parties in nine of the EU’s 27 member states and form the third-largest bloc in the European Parliament after the center. The People’s Party (EPP) and the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SDP).
This bloc, Identity and Democracy (ID), includes the most radical parties, such as Austria’s Freedom and the Northern League in Italy.
Other conservatives who identify with the right wing of the EPP, such as the Brothers of Italy and the Polish Law and Justice (PiS) party, belong to the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). Others are still lined up. If they all joined forces after June 9, the ECFR estimates that they would occupy 225 seats in a 720-seat chamber, making it the largest bloc.
Russia officially denies any interference in Western elections, but analysts are convinced otherwise.
Moscow is looking to push hardliners through what Maxim Alyukov, a researcher at the University of Manchester’s Department of Russian and Eastern European Studies, calls “pragmatic manipulation. “
“These far-right parties are seen [by Moscow] as allies because they are seen as centrifugal forces that can erode the team spirit within the EU, making it less difficult for Russia to identify its own hegemony,” he told Al Jazeera.
To influence the European vote, Alyukov warned that Moscow was rhetoric that had already been tested with the Russian electorate.
For example, amid the war in Ukraine, Russia has stepped up its anti-gay rights messages propagated through Western liberal democracies and in favor of classical family values.
“At some point, [the Kremlin] discovered that this was a very effective strategy to divide the other peoples of Russia. . . and weaponize this implicit homophobia that existed in Russia but was not a political instrument,” Alyuk said.
Russian media outlets, such as Rossiyskaya Gazeta, RIA Novosti, and Izvestia, which the European Commission took off the air in May, have been the conduits for this and other narratives. But there are also teams like Voice of Europe, which are not in Russia and have a generalized appearance.
Other data operations had European-sounding names such as Euro-More, France and EU, and Recent and Reliable News, said Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz-Zilitinkevic, professors of Russian studies at the University of Manchester and principal investigators of the Deceit (Mis)Translating study project, which tracks Russian covert press operations.
“All those media outlets gave the impression that in the context of the ban on Russia Today and Sputnik [in March 2022] they were alternatives,” Tolz-Zilitinkevic told Al Jazeera.
“[With] RT and Sputnik, it was very transparent that these were state-funded media outlets whose content was disinformation in the strictest sense of the word: fabricated material,” he said. “But those sites. . . their provenance is much less transparent, and their creation is clearly part of the strategy arranged through various actors in Russia, including the intelligence services. “
Some of those operations were easy to spot, Hutchings said, because they used device translations of original Russian articles or cited Russian media as sources.
“I have a feeling that [the Russians] are paying attention to those elections and see them as an opportunity for the good fortune of the right,” Hutchings told Al Jazeera.
They focus, he said, on “all the stories that paint the EU in a bad light”.
In liberal member states, for example, “they may simply be based on the underrepresentation of minorities in the European Parliament,” Hutchings said. “But in other places, such as Poland and Hungary, they will cling to anti-liberal and illiberal stances. “It sparked discourses that appeal to those populations. “
Perhaps the most competitive rhetoric is the argument that sanctions are Europe’s goal, as they raise the prices of power and the cost of living.
This ties into the narrative that “major foreign establishments are ruled by the elites of the Western liberal status quo and fundamentally enforce the law as they wish,” Aliukov said.
Russia justifies falsified reports with relativism, he said.
“[Russians] perceive that all information is subjective, political, and that if you live in Russia, you have to protect Russia’s interests. “
There is a goal of the military in exploiting political divisions in Western society, said Jade McGlynn, a member of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
“If we look at where their messages are focused, especially those related to elites, it suggests that what they are most concerned about is the strengthening of the West for Ukraine, and that the West is really giving Ukraine carte blanche to fight,” he said. . Al Jazeera.
The Kremlin is counting on Western restraint, propagated through conservatives who have amplified Russian arguments that the West provoked the Russian invasion and that its persistent defense of Ukraine would lead to nuclear war.
This effort failed.
Last April, the U. S. Congress passed a $60 million spending bill for Ukraine over Republican objections, and last week, the U. K. , France, Germany and the U. S. allowed Ukraine to use its weapons to attack Russian soil, angering the Kremlin.
The European elections provide a new opportunity, McGlynn told Al Jazeera.
“I think Russians think the West will lose interest in helping Ukraine before Russia loses its interest in destroying it. “
These narratives worked well in the landlocked countries of Central Europe that stretch across the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, from the Carpathians to the Alps, either because they have gigantic populations of Russophiles or because they have a vested interest in buying oil and pipeline fuel from Russia. .
All have effectively advocated for exemptions from the EU’s ban on Russian oil imports, which came into force in December 2022, and while many other EU states have followed suit, those geographically vulnerable to Russian material have been granted the longest exceptions.
The 2008 global currency crisis and the 2015 refugee crisis gave a big boost to far-right parties in the region, said Daniela Richterova, a professor of intelligence studies at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, who specializes in the former. Czechoslovakia.
“The working-class electorate, in particular, was disappointed by what they saw as the EU’s inability to contribute to the improvement of their economic conditions,” Richterova told Al Jazeera. “The EU’s control of the migration crisis. . . it has also made some voters sceptical about the pros and cons of being in the Schengen zone and having open borders. “
Since then, authoritarian, anti-immigrant, anti-globalist, Eurosceptic and populist parties have flourished here and in Europe.
Fidesz has been in force in Hungary since 2010 and the PiS party ruled Poland from 2015 to October 2023, thanks in part to a joint timetable of suppression of freedom of expression and judicial subversion.
The Party for Freedom, the third-largest party in the Netherlands in the 2010 parliamentary elections, rose to second place in 2017 and came first in November 2023. Its debatable leader, Geert Wilders, now dominates a coalition formed last month.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) won seats in a number of state legislatures in 2014 and won 12. 6% of the vote to enter the federal parliament in 2017.
In Finland, the Finnish party, formerly known as the True Finns, won 17. 7% of the vote in 2015 and governed as a coalition for two years. The Sweden Democrats became the second largest party in the country in 2022. here to force in Italy that year. In France, the National Front has increased its percentage of the vote in the last 3 presidential elections.
But the Austrian right precedes them all.
Under the leadership of Jorg Haider, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) came second in the 1999 general election, with no global crises, and formed a coalition with the center-right Austrian People’s Party, which had come third.
It was the first entry of a radical party into government since World War II and surprised Europe.
The FPÖ now outperforms all others by 29% on the basis of a pro-Russia program, as well as proceeding to import almost all Austrian oil and fuel from Russia.
That’s because Austrian ultra-conservatism and Russophile go beyond party lines, said Velina Chakarova, an independent representative for geopolitics and threats in Vienna.
“The [majority] conservatives were in force in 2018 when the state contract for the supply of Russian fuel was signed. It runs until 2040 and no one can say what it will contain,” he told Al Jazeera. “There is no exposure or The opposition forces tried to start a debate on this issue, but they did not succeed. “
The conservatives are now bleeding their electorate into the FPÖ, Chakarova says.
“The Conservatives won 37 percent in the last election, and they’re getting between 21 and 23 percent in the polls, which indicates where that difference is. “
The forces protecting Russian fuel are so tough that the decade-long process of devising a new security strategy — in which Chakarova was involved — failed last year when conservatives insisted on not diversifying from Russian fuel.
She said: “Today we still have a security strategy that dates back to 2013, before the first Russian invasion [of Ukraine], and in this document, Russia is a strategic partner. “
The FPÖ signed another secret agreement with Moscow in December 2016, this time with the United Russia party that supports President Vladimir Putin. This is a unique agreement, which was also signed a few months later between United Russia and the Northern League. , a far-right party in neighboring Italy.
Danilo Procaccianti, a senior journalist for the state broadcaster RAI Report, secured deals he shared with Al Jazeera.
They call for the sharing of reports on “party building, organisational work, youth policy, economic development. . . legislative activity,” and recommend that United Russia seek more information on the functioning of Europe’s two main democracies.
When Procaccianti interviewed Northern League leader Matteo Salvini after the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he downplayed the deal.
“They subsidized because, especially at the beginning of the war, it didn’t make sense to appear close to Putin,” Procaccianti told Al Jazeera.
In the year of the invasion, the League’s share of the popular vote also fell to 8. 79% from 17. 35% in 2018, but Procaccianti did not punish Salvini for his pro-Russian views.
“I don’t think it influenced the election results,” Procaccianti said, “because Italians pay little attention to foreign policy. . . Salvini has lost consensus because [Prime Minister Giorgia] Meloni has dried up her electoral base: they are fishing in the same sea. “
For Dimitar Bechev, a senior lecturer at Oxford’s School of Area and Global Studies (OSGA) and a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, the question is whether classical conservatives will embrace the right.
“The big question, in my opinion, is whether the EPP – the most likely winner – will recreate the coalition with the Social Democrats,” Bechev told Al Jazeera, “or turn to the conservative ECR party [Meloni, Orban, Poland’s PiS]. “A realignment between the centre-right and the far right would be a vital turning point”.