In an unprecedented decision on 6 December 2024, the Romanian constitutional court annulled the November 25 presidential elections after it received credible intelligence of large-scale external interference rigging the results of the first round in favour of a hardly-known far-right candidate, Calin Georgescu. His massive last-minute surge in support was largely blamed on Russian-controlled bots on TikTok.
This may seem like last year's news, but with elections coming up in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and possibly even Ukraine, there's plenty to worry about -- apart from a new US president who is disrupting Washington and the rest of the world with a flurry of executive orders and foreign policy initiatives that feel more like real estate sales pitches.
Concerns about Russian election interference are nothing new, but so far, the picture of Moscow's success is rather mixed.
Back in January 2017, the US intelligence community was confident that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential elections to get Donald Trump elected. The following year, similar accusations arose in the context of presidential elections in France. But in France, the Kremlin failed to prevent the victory of Emmanuel Macron.
In Georgia, Russian interference contributed to the victory of the incumbent government of the Georgian Dream party in parliamentary elections in October 2024. This sparked widespread and lasting protests in the country and prompted an increasingly brutal government crack-down on media and civil society.
By contrast, Russia failed twice last year to achieve favourable results at the polls in Moldova. Despite alleged Russian interference, the country's pro-Western president won a second term in November 2024. A referendum on a constitutional commitment to EU membership, coinciding with the first round of presidential elections two weeks earlier, was supported by a razor-thin majority of voters.
Attitude surveys offer some insights into the limitations of Russian election meddling but also evidence of trend of Putin’s growing popularity in the west.
Opinion polls on perceptions of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, across western democracies also offer some solace. According to a survey carried out by the Pew Research Center in 2024, positive views of Russia and its leader remain very low across EU and Nato member countries. At the same time, approval ratings of the EU and Nato remained high among member countries' citizens.
But these relatively comforting headline figures mask important, and somewhat worrying, trends. In Germany, which holds early parliamentary elections on February 23, positive views of Putin more than doubled from 8% in 2023 to 17% in 2024. This is still a far cry from the 76% who approved of Putin in 2003 or even the 36% who did so in 2019, according to the same survey. The German increase is an outlier among the 13 EU members (plus the US and Canada) that were included in the Pew survey, but in only one of them — Italy — did support drop, and in another — Poland — there was no change.
The same goes for support for the EU and Nato. The median level of support across nine EU members surveyed by Pew stands at 63%, with 36% of participants holding unfavourable views of the EU. Germany, with 63% favourable views, however, recorded the second consecutive decline, down from 78% in 2022 and 71% in 2023. And Germany is less of an outlier here — favourable views of the EU among member states have generally declined over the past two years.
When it comes to Nato, 63% of survey participants in 13 member countries thought more positively of the alliance, while 33% had more negative views. But again, with only two exceptions — Hungary and Canada (where favourability went up) — the share of those with positive views of Nato had declined by between two and eight percentage points since last year.
Does this mean that Putin is winning? No, he is not, or at least not yet. Attitude surveys are less important than election results.
Russia appears to have had some success in changing election outcomes and perhaps most spectacularly recently in Romania. Here, the country’s intelligence services discovered, and made public, clear evidence of voter manipulation. But the Romanian response of annulling the election is also illustrative of how critical it is for democracies to fight back -- and even more importantly to take preventive action.
And this is a lesson that seems to have sunk in. On January 30, the foreign ministers of twelve EU member states sent a joint letter to Brussels urging the European Commission to make more aggressive use of its powers under the Digital Services Act to protect the integrity of democratic elections in the bloc. Article 25 of that act, crucially, establishes an obligation on online platforms to design their services free from deception and manipulation and ensure that users can make informed decisions.
While the commission has yet to demonstrate its resolve under the Digital Services Act, a Berlin court on Friday, February 7, 2025, ruled against Elon Musk's X and ordered that information needed to track disinformation be released to two civil society groups who had requested it.
This highlights a broader point: if Putin is winning, he is not winning on his own. Democracies are not only under threat from Russia. Musk — an unelected billionaire wielding unprecedented influence under Donald Trump — has repeatedly been accused of interfering in European debates and election campaigns.
While Musk’s support focuses on the far-right, Putin backs whoever he considers serving Russian interests.
But does this mean that Musk and Putin share the same values? Not necessarily. What they have in common is their deep dislike of open liberal democracies and a cunning ability to employ technology to further their goal by promoting so-called anti-establishment political parties.
Where they differ is that Musk focuses on the far-right — Germany's AfD or the UK's Tommy Robinson. Putin's decisions who to back are more a function of what he sees as serving Russian interests: above all weakening western unity and influence. This leads to the Kremlin lending support to leaders on both the far right and far left ends of the political spectrum. Politically united mostly in their pro-Russian leanings, Hungary's Viktor Orbán and Slovakia's Robert Fico exemplify this divide in the EU and Nato.
But more often than not, Putin's and Musk's proteges are the same. In the case of the German AfD, it was no accident that Putin echoed comments in a Musk speech at an AfD election rally that Germans should move beyond their war guilt. Both were keen to remove the stain of being too close to Germany's Nazi past from the AfD and make it not just electable but also coalition-able, much like Austria’s far-right Freedom Party which has a long history of more-than-amicable relations with Putin. And what Musk can do openly on X, Putin tries to achieve with a campaign of his bot army on the platform.
Discontent with liberal democracy is a global trend beyond the west, but it is most prominent there and accelerating.
Perhaps the most significant similarity between Musk and Putin — and others who have been accused of election interference, like Iran and China — is that they tap into a growing reservoir of discontent with liberal democracy. And this is a trend well beyond the global west.
According to a 2024 survey of 31 democracies worldwide, 54% of participants were dissatisfied with how they saw democracy working. In 12 high income countries — Canada, US, and 10 EU member states — dissatisfaction was even higher with 64% and has been increasing for the fourth consecutive year.
Pushing back against the kind of blatant election interference by the likes of Putin and Musk is vital. That alone, however, will not be enough to reverse persistent trends of decline in the support for democracy and its standard bearers like the EU and Nato. It is imperative to resist and prosecute election rigging. But it is also crucial that this effort goes hand-in-hand with digging deeper into why people are dissatisfied with democracy — and to do something about it without delay.
An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on February 10, 2025.
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