Bribes and Lies: Foreign Interference in Europe in 2024

2024 is a year of critical elections around the world. This holds especially true in Europe, where, in June alone, the European Parliament elections, British snap elections, and surprise French parliamentary elections all took place in quick succession. In all these races, the political center held its ground despite the ubiquitous, if uneven, rise of far-right parties, and foreign interference was generally perceived as a nuisance but not as a key factor in the final outcomes.

However, this conclusion is misleading. It is true that foreign interference neither bears responsibility for the rise of European far-right parties nor had a direct impact on election results. Authoritarian regimes in Moscow and Beijing have nevertheless had a pernicious effect on European democracies—with implications for political dynamics across the continent. In the months and years leading up to the 2024 elections bonanza, these regimes have exacerbated existing divisions in European societies and fed the disinformation and corruption that led voters to lose faith in democratic institutions and processes. The first half of 2024 should lead European decision-makers and voters alike to realize that the continent is now the target of a constant stream of active measures that contribute to the rise of anti-democratic forces globally.

A Permeable Political Landscape

Earlier in 2024, a barrage of incidents in Europe came to light, revealing the vulnerability of EU and national political systems to nefarious foreign state-sponsored actors. Despite its waging a war of aggression on the very borders of the continent, Russia still found many European politicians willing to take its money and relay its talking points in public debate.

In March, Czechia took down the Prague-headquartered news site Voice of Europe. Contrary to what the outlet’s name might suggest, it was the brainchild of pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk and it allegedly paid politicians in countries including Germany, France, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Hungary to spread pro-Kremlin propaganda.

Relatedly, in May, Belgian and French authorities searched the offices and apartment of a parliamentary aide to far-right Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Marcel de Graaf for facilitating Russian interference, passive corruption, and membership in a criminal organization. Authorities believed that the aide had acted as an intermediary for payments to MEPs in exchange for their spreading Russian propaganda on Voice of Europe. He had previously assisted MEPs of the French National Rally and German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). That same month, AfD Bundestag member Peter Bystron saw his parliamentary immunity lifted following audio recordings indicating that he had received €20,000 in cash from sanctioned pro-Kremlin oligarch Artem Marchevsky.

These are not isolated incidents. For the better part of a decade, Russia has built a network of political proxies throughout Europe, many of them on the far right. The recent or anticipated electoral successes of parties like France’s National Rally, Germany’s AfD, Austria’s FPÖ, or Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, increase the attack surface available to the Kremlin as it continues to attempt to disrupt European politics. At the time of writing, all of these parties, bar the AfD, are consolidated in “Patriots for Europe”, a new group sponsored by Hungaryian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. It is the third-largest force in the European Parliament.

A more recent development is the People Republic of China’s (PRC) emulation of Russia’s interference tactics. Beijing’s professed attachment to noninterference in other countries’ internal affairs seems disingenuous following a slate of recent revelations. In late 2023, media reported that a Belgian far-right politician had been working with Chinese intelligence from 2019 until 2022 to “divide the US-EU relationship” and to push the PRC’s narratives on issues like the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and the repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

In April 2024, German authorities arrested the parliamentary aide to AfD MEP Maximilian Krah for repeatedly forwarding internal information from the European Parliament to the PRC’s secret service and for spying on Chinese dissidents living in Germany. Krah was the AfD’s top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament elections. He is now under investigation from German authorities for receiving payments from Russia and the PRC.

In June, mere days before Europeans went to vote for their MEPs, investigative reporters in the Netherlands revealed that a new political party, “Nederland met een plan”, had received donations from several associations with links to the PRC. One of those organizations was affiliated with the Chinese United Front Work Department, the agency responsible for coordinating influence operations to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the PRC’s policies. The new Dutch party promoted strong ties between the EU and the PRC and aimed to push back on supposedly anti-Chinese rhetoric.

A Permeable Information Landscape

Along with giving financial support to parties receptive to their interests, Russia and the PRC have also engaged in sustained campaigns of information manipulation to promote their narratives and talking points in Europe. Despite significant EU efforts to shut down Russia’s largest and most visible vectors of information manipulation, the Kremlin is still finding ways to reach Europeans in the information domain.

The Voice of Europe case is a great illustration of the nexus between information manipulation and malign finance. It was a news site based in Prague that masked its affiliation to the Russian state and used money to entice European politicians into delivering the Kremlin’s talking points all around the continent. Voice of Europe was only one of four Russian state-affiliated outlets sanctioned by the EU in May 2024.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg of Russia’s efforts to diversify its information manipulation channels now that its main outlets—like RT and Sputnik—are no longer accessible to most Europeans. In May, the Alliance for Securing Democracy highlighted how the Kremlin used a nesting doll system to repackage its propaganda and reproduce it on hundreds or mirror sites and faux local news outlets. These sites often obfuscated the fact that their content was sourced from RT, the primary Kremlin mouthpiece targeting foreign audiences. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, these reposter and aggregator sites ensure that RT’s content remains widely available in Europe despite EU sanctions banning the Russian propaganda outlet. This fits a pattern of other recent Russian information operations—including the widely publicized “Doppelgänger”—that use cut-outs, mirror, and proxy sites to bypass restrictions and push Kremlin-friendly narratives through websites that, at least on the surface, have no affiliation with the Russian government.

In addition to the networks of mirror sites, as recently as May 2024, Doppelgänger also targeted European audiences via social media platforms. According to a report from not-for-profit research group AI Forensics, between August 2023 and March 2024, 38 million French and German Facebook users were targeted with pro-Russian propaganda discrediting the EU and its support for Ukraine. In May alone, 275 anti-EU and anti-Ukraine political ads reached over 3 million Facebook users in France, Germany, Poland, and Italy.

Russia’s efforts are met with insufficient push back from the platforms they seek to infiltrate. While the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s flagship legislation to regulate online platforms, came into force in February 2024, it will take years for its provisions to have a real impact on the social media companies operating in the bloc. In the interim, those companies are inconsistently enforcing their own policies to stem the flow of state-sponsored information operations on their platforms. In the run-up to the 2024 European elections, media reported that pro-Russian ads were circulating on Facebook and that TikTok was approving disinformation-ridden ads for publication, to say nothing of a platform like X that has largely given up on labeling state-sponsored media and political ads.

On its networks of mirror sites as well as on social media platforms, there is also evidence that Russia is experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) to increase its informational firepower. In May 2024, cybersecurity company Recorded Future found that a network it assessed as “likely aligned with the Russian government” was using inauthentic websites to spread AI-generated disinformation and amplifying pro-Russian narratives about the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Israel. Using AI to plagiarize, translate, and edit content from mainstream media outlets, the network tailored articles to specific audiences, primarily in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, and published over 19,000 articles per month.

Microsoft brought to light another case of Russia’s use of AI tools in June 2024. According to the technology company, “Russian influence actors” had been working to discredit the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris since at least June 2023. For instance, they created “Olympics Has Fallen”, a faux Netflix documentary narrated by an AI-generated Tom Cruise voice, which they promoted across social media using AI-edited videos of American celebrities. In addition, they replicated reputable media outlets and public bodies like the CIA and a French intelligence agency to disseminate Kremlin-talking points under the guise of authoritative sources.

The PRC is also contributing to the information onslaught targeting Europe. Since the outbreak of Russia’s war in Ukraine, pro-PRC messaging has consistently, and ever increasingly, supported Russian narratives about the legitimacy of its invasion. In “Global South” countries in particular, PRC diplomats and state media constantly portray the United States and its European allies as nefarious forces whose influence needs to be stamped out.

In Europe, in the run-up to the 2024 parliamentary election, the French government revealed a PRC-led information manipulation campaign aimed to discredit Raphaël Glucksmann, a candidate who had taken positions critical of Beijing. The PRC can also rely on certain European pundits to carry water for its narratives. For instance, in mid-May, the editor in chief of Slovak Zem&Vek magazine and a candidate for the far-right Republika party in the European elections traveled to the PRC to foster ties with its propaganda apparatus. During his trip, he met with the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, participated in discussions with state-owned broadcaster CCTV, and was interviewed by the People’s Daily about the “conditions in the collapsing European Union”.

Conclusion

The long list of interference cases over the past few months alone highlights lingering vulnerabilities within Europe’s political systems. Politicians at the EU and national level, often in far-right parties, are willing to amplify Russian narratives that go against their own countries’ interests, sometimes in exchange for financial remuneration, other times simply because those ideas align with their worldview. With the PRC now replicating Moscow’s tactics and pro-Russian politicians and parties becoming stronger political forces in Europe, the attack surface available to authoritarians is steadily growing. Furthermore, despite EU sanctions and legislation, divisive pro-Kremlin narratives are still finding their way to European audiences, with Russia’s campaign to legitimize its war in Ukraine amplified by PRC support. Finally, the advent of the AI era and the ever-evolving information manipulation tactics used by authoritarian state-sponsored actors make Europe’s already vulnerable information landscape even more so.

EU countermeasures exist but fail to adequately match the determination of democracies’ adversaries. As Russia’s allies in the European Parliament consolidate and grow as a political force, there needs to be a stronger reaction from their political opponents to call out the danger these forces pose for the sovereignty of Europe and the survival of its democracies. The creation of a dedicated vice president for democracy, supported by a directorate-general for democracy in the European Commission, called for by a broad section of European civil society organizations, would be a good place to start.