Stoking division: How Putin is helping the rise of the right

Geert Wilders, the Dutch far-right politician, has just had a very successful election, leading to his PVV party taking the largest tranche of seats of any party—37 of the 150. Due to proportional representation in the political system, a coalition will have to be formed to get him to a ruling majority of 76 seats. This could be a challenge with many parties having previously stated they would not entertain power-sharing. But the promise of power often changes minds.

Thankfully, one important characteristic of coalitions is that they temper the edges of any extreme party that plays a part. Necessarily, if a party sitting at one end of the political spectrum goes into coalition, the partners will sit further in the other direction and will cause the former to compromise on some of their more excessive desires.

This swing to the right in The Netherlands is not a surprise for those looking closely at the prevailing political winds blowing across the continent.

Europe is particularly struggling at the moment with the resurgence of the far right. World War II is but a distant memory. Indeed, it is not even that. It is something we learn about in school textbooks.

This resurgence of extreme views openly across societies has been seen right across Europe:

• Viktor Orban rules as a quasi-dictator, in Hungary, with his Fidesz Party rolling back democratic mechanisms and institutions, interfering with the judiciaries and the freedom of the press.
• The Law and Justice Party in Poland has embraced religious conservatism, banning abortion and waging culture wars. Although it was recently unable to secure a majority, the somewhat anti-EU party still garnered the most seats, though could not form its own coalition.
• France's National Rally (formerly National Front) has grown under the leadership of Marine Le Pen (and now Jordan Bardella), increasing the number of its MPs in their National Assembly from 7 to 89 seats. Marine Le Pen was able to get through the initial rounds of the presidential election in both 2017 and 2022 to face Emmanuel Macron, increasing her own vote share to 41.45% in 2022.
• Italy now has a far-right ruling coalition of three parties after the collapse of Mario Draghi’s national unity government in July 2022. Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy (FdI) party became Prime Minister, in coalition with populist Matteo Salvini's League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. They won 237 of the 400 seats in the Chamber of Deputies with 43.8% of the vote.
• Slovakia's populist anti-American, pro-Kremlin leader Robert Fico, with his center-left Smer party, went into coalition with another leftist party and an ultranationalist Slovak National Party. This makes one wonder whether traditional political ideology plays second fiddle to populism. After all, Fico's positions of anti-immigration and anti-LGBT rights, among other policies, smacks of rightist thinking.
• Germany's anti-immigration and anti-EU AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) has recently seen a surge in support (particularly in the East—the AfD is now polling at 35% in Saxony, a significant 6 percentage points above the CDU at 29%).
• In 2022, in Sweden, the far-right, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats garnered 20% of the votes and supported the election of Conservative leader Ulf Kristersson as Prime Minister. Though the Sweden Democrats are not formally in the coalition, they provide confidence and supply support for the three-party right-wing coalition.
• Finland's April election saw the popular Sanna Marin lose her position as Prime Minister as her coalition partners suffered a huge shift to the right to the benefit of the populists. A four-party right-wing coalition rules, including the populist far-right Finns Party.
• A year away from national elections, Austria's far right is far more popular than ever before, with the populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) weathering scandals to be a major contender. Along with several other right-wing parties such as Germany’s AfD, Italy’s The League, and France’s Rassemblement National, the FPÖ is part of the Identity and Democracy Group of the European Parliament, making a minority right group stronger within the institution of the EU.
• In Greece this summer, the New Democracy Party won a landslide victory with over 40% of the vote. However, more worrying was the success of the Spartans, "a recently formed far-right nativist group that gained 12 seats in Greece’s 300-seat Parliament. Widely seen as a direct descendant of the outlawed neo-Nazi Golden Dawn group, which was declared a criminal organization in 2020, the Spartans were enthusiastically endorsed by Ilias Kasidiaris, a former Golden Dawn lawmaker." Two other far-right parties—Greek Solution and the religiously conservative Niki—also outperformed expectations. Cumulatively, the far right gained close to 13% of the vote, translating to 34 seats in Greek Parliament.
• Spain's Vox has been growing in popularity, with their leader Santiago Abascal having strong nationalist, anti-feminist, Eurosceptic, anti-abortion, anti-climate policy views. The conservative People's Party won the most votes but was unable to form a government with Vox.
• In Serbia, there is a huge growth in extremist ultra-nationalism, affecting the Balkans at large.
• In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the leader of the secession movement has been meeting with Russian government officials, threatening the whole constitutional standing of the country.
• There has been huge polarisation in Montenegro, through the influence of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
• Even in the UK, there has been a significant increase over the last decade in anti-immigration sentiments that bubbled over into the UK choosing to leave the EU, and political parties like UKIP gaining huge traction.

I could go on but you get the point.

There are many reasons for this political sea change. For example, immigration as a result of economic challenges, war and political instability, and climate,—these are causing a massive headache for the continent of Europe. One could also look at changes in traditional industries, manufacturing, the impact of mechanization and IT, and so on, and wonder what effects are being felt on working people.

What is discussed here is not to detract from these issues, to pretend they don't exist. It is not to deny that there are organic political movements motivated by a perceived need to deal with such issues.

And yet one thread that connects almost all of these places can be traced all the way back to the Kremlin. There is an explicit campaign to hijack these movements to drive a huge Russian wedge into these divisive political schisms.

If there is one thing we can be certain of, it is that Vladimir Putin wants to destabilize much of the rest of the world, and, in particular, the EU. Though the Russian Federation is geographically part of continental Europe, it is the neighboring EU that presents a consistent and tangible threat to Putin and his objectives. For over a decade now, European leaders have tried to change Russia and Putin by welcoming them into the pack and hoping that globalization and capitalism can work their magic on Russia's institutions, behavior, and ideology. Putin was open to being molded.

Or so they thought.

The war in Ukraine has shown this project to be nothing short of a huge failure. Putin's rose-tinted view of Soviet and Russian history, coupled with his narcissistic megalomaniacal imperialism, easily overcame European desires to see their own vision of Russia's future.

There have been some catastrophic miscalculations on both sides, as his invasion has shown.

Putin had his own ideas about where the Russian Federation was headed: away from EU and US influence and toward the alternative hegemony of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). Part of the project for establishing a world order with Russia at the top (or, more accurately, sharing the top position with China, as Putin would have seen it), has been to destabilize the EU. With incredibly effective disinformation mechanisms at his fingertips, Putin has been able to sow discord and stir disharmony on the streets and at the ballot boxes around the world.

If Ukraine were to lose its war on the ground, then we would have every chance of losing back at home at the ballot boxes and on our streets.

This has not been confined to Europe. Just the other week, the White House released a statement concerning the Russian government's financing of "an ongoing, well-funded disinformation campaign across Latin America":

The Kremlin’s campaign plans to leverage developed media contacts in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, among other countries in Latin America, in order to carry out an information manipulation campaign designed to surreptitiously exploit the openness of Latin America’s media and information environment. The Kremlin’s ultimate goal appears to be to launder its propaganda and disinformation through local media in a way that feels organic to Latin American audiences to undermine support for Ukraine and propagate anti-U.S. and anti-NATO sentiment.

The Social Design Agency (SDA), the Institute for Internet Development, and Structura coordinated on the development of an information manipulation campaign targeting Latin America that aims to promote Russia’s strategic interests in the region at the expense of other countries by overtly and covertly coopting local media and influencers to spread disinformation and propaganda. These are “influence-for-hire” firms with deep technical capability, experience in exploiting open information environments, and a history of proliferating disinformation and propaganda to further Russia’s foreign influence objectives.

Unfortunately, this is all built on a foundation of successful meddling in Europe.

Dr. Ivana Stradner, from The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who was recently interviewed by The Telegraph for their "Ukraine: the Latest" podcast, explained:

"Information is the weapon that Russia has been using to target the West.... Russian military strategies: they openly claim that in the ongoing revolution with information technologies, information psyhcological warfare will largely pave the ground for victory. The Chief of Staff for the Russian military openly claimed that Russia values non-military to military measures as to 4:1. Russia has been invesating tremendous resources in the information space.... With the upcoming elections in the United States but also in the European Union, you will see very sophisticated Russian influence operations, and do not forget that Russia have started to use artificial intelligence..."

The Kremlin's fingerprints are all over almost every single one of the previously bullet-pointed political shifts.

The connections between Russia and Viktor Orban have been well documented. From direct funding for what can be seen as Russia's vassal state of Hungary to energy links, Orban is Russia's Trojan horse inside the European Union. This is all the more worrying considering that Hungary is not only a member of the EU but also of NATO.

Recent election success Robert Fico has declared that Slovakia, an erstwhile staunch supporter of the beleaguered state, will no longer provide military aid to Ukraine. In one of the last election debates, Holland's Geert Wilders said that he would not support sending Ukraine more weapons, even after Russians have been convicted in absentia in The Hague for shooting down MH-17 and killing 193 Dutch citizens.

Greece, a country with a huge stock of Soviet-era weapons that would have been very useful for Ukraine, has been strangely quiet in support of the country, only giving old equipment away in return for much more modern NATO matériel provided by others.

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Austria has hidden behind their neutrality, but certainly let their feelings be shown when all of their FPÖ politicians walked out of parliament during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's speech, claiming it violated Austrian neutrality. In 2019 while on holiday in Ibiza, the then-deputy chancellor and the leader of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), was filmed trying to accept a bribe from a fake Russian oligarch. The history of the relationship with Russia is analyzed in the European Center for Populism Studies piece "The Case of the Austrian Radical Right and Russia During the War in Ukraine."

Back in 2014, French media reported that the country’s far-right National Front (now Rassemblement National) party had funded its election campaign with loans worth €11m from Russian banks. In 2016, journalists in Italy alleged that then-interior minister Matteo Salvini’s far-right League party (now in the ruling coalition) had struck an oil deal with Russia in order to finance its 2019 European Parliament election campaign. Buzzfeed was later said to have obtained a recording of the meeting.  In 2017, French far-right MEPs (Members of European Parliament) supported Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea. How convenient.

Spain's online platform for conservative campaigners, CitizenGO, known for “coordinating large-scale e-petitions, including against transgender rights and abortion” sent a fundraising letter in 2013 to pro-Putin oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev (who has close links to CitizenGO board member Alexey Komov) bringing about an apparent subsequent funding agreement between the two parties.

As Open Democracy reports in their piece "We know Russia funds Europe’s far Right. But what does it get in return?":

Elsewhere, Grégor Puppinck of the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) was among a delegation from La Manif Pour Tous – a French campaign organisation opposing the rights of same-sex couples to marry and adopt children – to attend a 2014 trip to Moscow. The trip reportedly included visits to both chambers of the Russian parliament, as well as various ministries, with the Moscow Patriarchate representative in the EU saying the delegation’s overall aim was to “find cooperation partners in Russia to defend traditional values”.

The ECLJ is the European arm of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), headed by Donald Trump’s impeachment attorney. Since 2007, the ACLJ has transferred more than $3.3m to a Russian evangelical group, the Slavic Center for Law and Justice, whose head sits on Putin’s Human Rights Council.

Germany's AfD, with its heartland in the former East Germany (where Vladimir Putin served as a young KGB officer), has very strong connections to Russia. Indeed, German media outlet DW has reported on how the party has received sponsored visits to Moscow:

"But this is the first time that an until-now-assumed connection to the AfD has been demonstrated," the Green Bundestag deputy Omid Nouripour told the newspaper. "That is fatal and shocking. The AfD is the extension of Putin's arm in the German parliament."

In a further example, the AfD seems to have played a role in Russia’s recruitment of a senior German intelligence officer who supplied Russia with information about the war in Ukraine. It is worth remembering that former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is a friend of Putin's, with the Russian dictator attending Schröder’s birthday parties, and once taking Schröder on a Christmas sleigh ride in Moscow. After leaving office, Schröder was appointed chairman of the boards of two major Russian-controlled energy companies, Nord Stream AG and Rosneft.

The Russians really are very good at covert influence operations. As far as return on investment goes, such projects are vastly more successful than the ill-advised invasion of sovereign Ukraine.

The Balkans is a hotbed of ultranationalist fervor. (And you can throw into the mix the fact that Serbia has received 200,000 Russians of varying views since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.) Dr. Ivana Stradner adds the following in her interview:

"There is another hybrid warfare effort in the Balkans.… Russia has been investing tremendous resources in the Balkans to destabilize it.... What Putin perfectly understands, and this is a true victory for the Kremlin, is the culture, he understands the ethnic tensions, the identity politics playing in the region... and he has been weaponizing and that, whether it's through the church, whether it's through soft power or what I like to call invisible weapons, but also through visible weapons because he has been arming Serbia for a very long time. He also has his own goals, which are to push the Balkans to the brink and re-establish Russia as the only reliable conflict negotiator in the region...to strengthen Moscow's regional standing and it would also give Putin leverage...in the region....

"Russia has truly been investing tremendous resources in far-right groups, not only in Serbia but also in Bosnia and Montenegro, because those groups can always mobilize to challenge any question that they want to challenge, whether it be the question of religion because Russia has been using (with the help of Serbia) the Serbian Orthodox Church to further polarise the society, especially for example in Montenegro....

"As someone who grew up in Serbia, I have never seen so much nationalism in my life. Basically, right now, the nationalism, especially among the youngsters is very concerning...."

However, the Kremlin's efforts are not just restricted to the information space, as Lawfare points out in their article "Russia’s Far-Right Campaign in Europe":

Russia already has a means to act on these threats. The Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) is an international far-right group, which was listed as a specially designated terrorist organization by the United States in April 2020. The U.S. policy was “the first time in history” that the U.S. government had “designated a white supremacist group,” as then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pointed out at the time. Subsequent reporting highlighted how the group had provided training centers in St. Petersburg for Swedish, German, Slovakian, Finnish, and Danish right-wing radicals. One of the Swedes, Anton Thulin, was a member of the Nordic Resistance Movement and was jailed for bombing a refugee center in Gothenburg in 2017. That attack was one of three carried out by his cell; others targeted a Swedish left-wing organization and another refugee center. Upon his release, Thulin went to Poland where he sought additional training. RIM leader Stanislav Vorobyov has been linked to extreme-right groups across Europe. Other RIM members have trained and gone to fight in Ukraine in support of the Russian offensive. But the problem of far-right Russian sympathizers joining the fight goes well beyond just RIM—numerous Italian, French, and other European extremists have also elected to go and fight alongside Russian-supporting groups in Ukraine.

In a European Parliament Briefing titled "Russia and the Western Balkans: Geopolitical confrontation, economic influence and political interference," the authors note the following:

Although the Western Balkan region lies beyond what Russia considers its immediate sphere of interest, the Kremlin has found it easy and useful to use the tools of foreign influence and interference in the region, especially following its invasion of Crimea in 2014, in order to protect its interests and project its narratives. Targeted and low-cost (asymmetric) operations in the information space, including (dis)information campaigns, cyber-attacks and clandestine operations, combined with the support of proxy organisations and the use of political and economic influence, have been effective in exploiting structural vulnerabilities and societal and political divisions in all six Western Balkan countries.

Russia has used these hybrid strategies to pursue three objectives in the region, with varying degrees of intensity and success over time: i) preserve the status quo, where convenientfor Russian interests (i.e. in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina); ii) undermine the EU and NATO, slowing down full integration into Western institutions; and, to a lesser extent, iii) protect Russia's economic interests (and those of its elites)

Quite often, Russian intentions can also be to stoke confusion as much as to drive division, since both allow for discord.

Election meddling (not to be confused with collusion) is a favorite Russian pastime, with now accepted evidence of interference in several US elections, the Brexit referendum, and many European national and local elections. These repeated assaults on democracy should have been the most raucous of wake-up calls. Alas, too many people want to bury their heads in the sand. All the while, Putin gains the meddling upper hand. The details of US and UK election interference have been well documented, and continued activity can be easily witnessed any time one logs onto Twitter (now X).

European elections have been fair game for the Kremlin. Take Konstantin Malofeev, who is a Russian politician and businessman known as the “Orthodox oligarch” due to his religiosity. He has been sanctioned by the EU and the US for his involvement in the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, who have themselves accused Malofeev of financing illegal pro-Russian paramilitary groups. “Malofeev has carried out the Kremlin’s tasks, which have included interfering in the Bosnian and Polish elections,” according to Kalev Stoicescu, a researcher of Russian affairs at the International Centre for Defence Studies, a think tank in Tallinn, Estonia. Malofeev’s network has even been able to make "amendments for different motions to be presented to either the European Parliament or national legislatures."

The EU is to hold its own European elections next year. Having seen the obvious interference in the Slovakian election in September, and many others this year and previously, EU politicians are deeply concerned:

The risk that Moscow interferes in next year's EU election is “particularly serious,” [European Commission Vice President Věra] Jourová said. "The Russian State has engaged in the war of ideas to pollute our information space with half-truths and lies to create a false image that democracy is no better than autocracy,” she said.

The Commission and the Slovak media regulator had a string of meetings in Bratislava earlier this month with companies including Facebook's Meta, Google's Alphabet and TikTok, telling them to invest more to curb the problem, POLITICO reported Monday. Jourová said the country was "fertile ground" for Russian pro-war narratives, echoing similar fears from independent researchers and the country’s media watchdog.

Elon Musk's Twitter/X has just come in for some serious criticism from both the EU and, this week, Bloomberg. After leaving the voluntary code of practice, Musk has overseen the platform having the highest ratio of disinformation posts of all large social media platforms. As The Guardian summarises in the context of the fight against predominantly Russian propaganda and information warfare:

LinkedIn’s owner, Microsoft, stopped 6.7m fake accounts being created and removed 24,000 pieces of fake content

YouTube, owned by Google, told the EU it had removed more than “400 channels involved in coordinated influence operations linked to the Russian-state sponsored Internet Research Agency”.

Tiktok removed almost 6m fake accounts and 410 unverifiable adverts.

Google removed advertising from almost 300 sites linked to “state-funded propaganda sites” and rejected more than 140,000 political advertisers for “failing identity verification processes”.

Meta, the report says, expanded its fact-checking to 26 partners covering 22 languages in the EU, now also including Czech and Slovak.

It reported that 37% of users also cancelled sharing when notified of fake news, a sign the EU says of the value consumers put on labelling disinformation.

Tiktok had almost six million fake accounts (mostly from Spain, Germany, Italy, and France) removed in the first half of the year! This was followed by another 850,000 accounts in the second half of the year... It also removed several explicit disinformation campaigns including a network of over 3,000 Russian-created fake accounts. These were followed by around 418,000 people, with the fake accounts sharing false content in German about the war in Ukraine and its consequences on EU countries’ economies.

There is so much more to be said concerning various online platforms and the ubiquitous specter of disinformation.

There are some notable exceptions to the insidious reach of Russian influence into Europe's right pulling the marionette's strings. For example, Georgia Meloni, Italy's prime minister, is a staunch supporter of Ukraine, although this is significant because it is in stark contrast with her coalition partners. The late Silvio Berlusconi saw himself as a dear friend of Putin, exchanging presents even after the war in Ukraine began. Meloni's positioning, therefore, came as a surprise to many analysts. Coalition partner Matteo Salvini has said the Italian government would veto EU sanctions against Russia.

Poland, too, has bucked the trend, though this is down to a very complex history with Russia where there is no love lost in many quarters (including the prevailing theory that Russia was responsible for the downing a Polish Air Force flight in 2010 killing 96 people including the president and his wife, and a whole host of incredibly important Polish officials). On the other hand, investigations have shown that the present blockade at the Polish and Slovakian borders with Ukraine by a huge number of Polish and Slovakian truckers have very definite connections to Russia.

The Russians really are very good at covert influence operations. As far as return on investment goes, such projects are vastly more successful than the ill-advised invasion of sovereign Ukraine. Russia seeks to both weaken functioning democracies and to fulfill geopolitical strategies. Putin is paranoid about his neighbors, but perhaps more paranoid about envisaging his own population looking over the fence with envy, seeing that the grass really is greener.

Putin is not interested in making things better for his electorate. He is far more obsessed with destroying everyone else's lot. And he has troll farms and bot farms to help achieve those ends.

But this is not confined to outside Russia's borders, it is also a decade-long domestic approach. Putin has weaponized religion and conservative values (a far cry from Soviet Russia in ideology if not in practical methodology). Marc Bennetts, in the New Humanist’s excellent “From here to eternity“, observed the following back in 2017:

The social and religious conservatism driving these religious radicals was granted the status of Russia’s unofficial ideology in 2012, after mass anti-Putin protests in Moscow. In a keynote speech to parliament after the protests had been quelled, Putin declared that a strict adherence to “traditional values” was the only way to prevent Russia and the world from slipping into what he called “chaotic darkness”. In a separate speech, he also accused Western countries of betraying their Christian roots and pursuing polices that “place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan.”...

“If Russia continues down this road, by 2030 Russia will be like mediaeval Spain, where the Inquisition persecuted non-believers and heretics,” Alexei Bushmakov, a defence lawyer involved in one of the first trials on insulting religious believers, tells me. “It’s terrifying to think what will happen if people are deprived of the right to choose what to believe and what not to believe in.”

One of the best ways to achieve political obedience is through conformity, and this is most easily achieved through appeal to political conservatism and traditionalism. Those on the liberal left are far too likely to stick their noses up at authority.

Whether it be domestically, or internationally, the rise of the far right, driven by a Russian desire for (at the same time) domestic conformity and foreign chaos is a deep concern. Indeed, one Latvian political analysis concludes that Russian connections with Europe's far right warrants great concern as it has already affected EU policy-making:

The following cooperation between the Kremlin and European far-right parties should be taken seriously by the European Union. Last year revealed the need for rethinking and strengthening the Common Foreign and Security Policy, especially in relation to Russia. Russia’s partnership with European extreme right is one of the reasons behind driving the divide in the Member States’ policies towards Moscow, resulting in the weakening of the European Union’s institutional capacity. "Examining the Kremlin’s and Far-Right Parties Cooperation: Should the EU be Worried?", Latvijas Ārpolitikas Institūts

The outcome of the war in Ukraine could not be more important for us all. Global stability hangs in the balance in both a military and a non-military sense. If Russia were to prevail, our epistemic security—the threat to our sense of knowledge and truth—would continue to be assaulted in the information spaces of our virtual world, translating into division, discord, and electoral results that favor Russia. If we want to have proper control over our own sovereign futures, it is imperative that Ukraine wins on the battlefields of Bakhmut and Avdiivka, of Kupiansk and Kherson. This might then lead to a regime change in Russia and a fresh start for the nation, keeping the insidious whispers of Russkiy Mir out of our heads and off our screens.

If Ukraine were to lose its war on the ground, then we would have every chance of losing back at home at the ballot boxes and on our streets.

The Russian invasion is not restricted to the borders of Ukraine. Over there, money buys tanks. Over here, money buys words, influence, and division.

Beware.