Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned last week that Russia will ramp up its meddling ahead of next month’s parliamentary elections, which preceded European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova assessing that they’d be a test of the bloc’s disinformation resilience. This speculation is nothing new, but what’s different this time around is that the attempted assassination of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico will be on every voter’s mind, thus likely influencing the outcome.
The preceding hyperlinked analysis argued that fake news was responsible for radicalizing the pro-Ukrainian suspect into thinking that shooting his premier was a legitimate form of protest against what he’d been misled by the media into believing was his “pro-Russian dictator with blood on his hands”. This black swan event might have served the short-term interests of that leader’s many enemies, but the blowback could be considerable if it leads to a conservative landslide during next month’s elections.
Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban predicted that the upcoming vote will influence the direction of war and peace in Europe, and while the European Parliament admittedly can’t do much in terms of shaping the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine, it could still exert positive pressure if conservatives win. It’s with that in mind that Eurocrats like von der Leyen and Jourova are fearmongering about Russian meddling since they want to preemptively discredit this potential outcome.
To be sure, the first of those two had no idea that an assassination attempt would be made against Fico the day after she shared her earlier mentioned warning, but the second’s assessment about the upcoming elections being a test of the bloc’s disinformation resilience came some days later. Instead of speaking vaguely about alleged Russian meddling, the Eurocrats are now honing their information warfare narrative to muddle the conversation about Fico’s attempted assassination and its political aftermath.
The targeted audience is the unclear number of on-the-fence voters who might usually lean liberal but have recently begun to sympathize with some conservative positions on issues like Ukraine. Last week’s incident was driven by the liberal media’s fake news about the Slovak leader, which might influence some of these voters to give the more narratively responsible conservatives their support. In an attempt to desperately prevent this, the Eurocrats want them think that it would be doing Russia’s bidding.
If the European Parliamentary elections have absolutely no effect on anything, then they wouldn’t care who votes for whom, but the outcome will clearly at the very least have a major impact on popular perceptions and could lead to cascading consequences like more anti-war protests across the bloc. It’s for this reason that the Eurocrats and their media allies, including those being promoted by state-run Ukrainian outlets like this one here, are pushing the abovementioned information warfare narrative.
The growing gap between liberals and conservatives over Ukraine, which is foreign policy issue that Fico was most closely associated with, is naturally occurring as a result of their polar opposite worldviews and not due to Russian meddling. It’s so emotive and significant that some from both sides have become single-issue voters who’ll cast their ballots purely based on candidates’ positions towards this. Attempting to discredit this trend as being due to Russian meddling is disrespectful to democracy.