Europe’s 2027 Stress Test

Next year, several EU countries representing more than half of the EU population are due to hold national elections – presidential or parliamentary – by direct popular vote: Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, and Spain.

Considering today’s geopolitical upheavals and recalibrations of the international alliances directly affecting the European continent, it would hardly be an exaggeration to assume that foreign interference will most likely 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 curb and prevent foreign political meddling.

In recent years, several countries were generally recognised by Brussels 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”, EUvsDisinfo, prominently lists only two “threat actors” – Russia and China.

Russia has indeed been actively involved in information warfare against the West in general and against the EU in particular since at least 2009, when the state-sponsored Russia Today TV channel was reorganised from a soft-power instrument into a fully fledged information assault weapon named RT. And especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 – followed by the imposition of Western sanctions on Russia – Moscow has been working tirelessly and employing a vast range of tools to influence socio-political processes across the West to undermine the democratic resolve to defend the international order, however imperfect it was.

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China, too, has tried to influence politics in the EU, predominantly to reduce support for positions that Beijing sees as hostile, especially regarding Taiwan, human rights abuses and, in particular, persecution of Uyghurs, scrutiny of Chinese technology companies, investment, and infrastructure projects, etc. However, unlike Russia, which has bet on political disruption and social polarisation to leverage its malign influence, China aims to prove its responsibility as a political and economic partner, and – instead of meddling in elections – prefers to develop friendly relations with European politicians, (former) officials, 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 against the EU.

However, developments over the last two years suggest that malign foreign 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.