Putin’s playground

Georgescu’s massive last-minute surge in the polls was largely blamed on the creation of thousands of paid-for Russian-controlled bots on TikTok and illegal campaign financing.

This may seem like last year’s news, but with elections coming up in Germany, Poland, Czechia and possibly even Ukraine, there’s plenty to worry about apart from a new US president who is disrupting Washington (and 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 were made in the context of presidential elections in France, despite the fact that the Kremlin failed to prevent the victory of Emmanuel Macron.

More recently, in Georgia, the incumbent Georgian Dream party won the parliamentary elections in October after alleged Russian interference. This sparked widespread protests and a government crackdown on media and civil society.

By contrast, despite alleged Russian interference in Moldova, the country’s pro-western president won a second term in November 2024. A referendum on a constitutional commitment to EU membership was supported by a razor-thin majority of voters.

Opinion polls on perceptions of Russia and Vladimir Putin across Western democracies also offer some solace. According to a survey 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 23 February, 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, but in only one of them — Italy — did support for Putin drop, compared with the previous year.

The same goes for support for the EU and NATO. The median level of support for the EU across nine member states surveyed stands at 63%, with 36% of participants holding unfavourable views. Germany, where 63% of the population said they had a favourable view of the EU, however, recorded its 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 somewhat 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 the exception of Hungary and Canada, where favourability went up, the share of those with favourable views had declined by between 2–8% since last year.

Does this mean that Putin is winning? No, at least not yet. Attitude surveys are less important than election results.

Russia appears to have had some recent success in changing election outcomes, for instance in Romania, where the country’s intelligence services discovered evidence of voter manipulation. The decision to annul the elections is a good example of how important it is for democracies to fight back in such cases, and, even more importantly, to take preventive action.

This is a lesson that seems to have sunk in. On 30 January, the foreign ministers of 12 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, places 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 7 February ordered X to hand over data needed to track disinformation to two civil society groups who had requested it.

If Putin is winning, he is not winning on his own. Democracies are not only under threat from Russia, of course. Musk — an unelected billionaire wielding unprecedented influence under Donald Trump — has repeatedly been accused of interfering in European debates and election campaigns. Among his comments on the German election, Musk has argued that as he has significant investments in Germany he has the right to comment on its politics and that the AfD “resonates with many Germans who feel their concerns are ignored by the establishment”.

What Musk and Putin have in common is their deep dislike of open liberal democracies and a cunning ability to employ technology to further their goals by promoting political parties and movements that share their illiberal views.

Where they differ is that Musk focuses on the far right — Germany’s AfD or the UK’s Tommy Robinson — whereas Putin tends to back whoever he sees as serving Russian interests in weakening Western unity and influence. This leads to the Kremlin lending support to leaders on both the far right and far left.

But often Putin’s and Musk’s protégés are the same. In the case of the AfD, it was no accident that Putin echoed comments from a speech Musk gave at an AfD election rally, saying 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 respectable enough to bring into a coalition, much like Austria’s far-right Freedom Party which has a long history of friendly relations with Putin.

But what Musk can do openly on X, Putin is attempting to achieve by using his bot army on the platform. Perhaps the most significant similarity between Musk and Putin is that they tap into a growing reservoir of discontent with liberal democracy.

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 with democracy was even higher at 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 clearly important. But it will not be enough to reverse persistent trends of decline in the support for democracy and its standard bearers including the EU and NATO. It is right to resist and prosecute election rigging. But it is also crucial to ask why people are dissatisfied with democracy, and to do something about it.