The EU: from propaganda and censorship to electoral interference

How Brussels is destroying democracy in the name of saving it

Edited transcript of an interview I gave to to Hungarian journalist Tamás Maráczi for the Danube Institute and the Hungarian Conservative.

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I asked the artificial intelligence on the European Democracy Shield, and this answer came back: “The European Democracy Shield (EDS) is a comprehensive initiative proposed by the European Commission in 2025–2026 to defend democratic processes against foreign information manipulation, interference (FIMI), and hybrid threats. It aims to safeguard electoral integrity, free media, and boost societal resilience against digital threats like deepfakes and misinformation”. It means that they defend us in the age of digital disinformation. But in one of your articles, you didn’t welcome this. Why?

Well, I think the AI has been a bit optimistic there, or maybe it should check its sources again, because the problem is that we’re living in a really Orwellian world where the language that is used by the political establishment, the political leaders, does not reflect reality. So in this case, the European Commission claims that they are defending democracy from foreign interference, from disinformation, but the paradox is that in order to allegedly defend democracy, they have to effectively destroy it. Because what they’re saying is effectively: “We need more censorship, we need the ability to intervene more directly in elections”.

But in the age of Russian cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns, doesn’t Europe need a shield against them?

What is the evidence for these alleged cases?

Don’t you have experience with this as a journalist?

I looked at these alleged cases of supposed Russian drone incursions, Russian hacking, Russian disinformation schemes, and it’s hard to uncover any actual evidence that Russia or any other foreign actor is behind these events. In fact, those who claim to be protecting us from Russian disinformation are themselves engaging in this information war by spreading unfounded allegations about this supposed massive hybrid war waged against Europe.

At the 2016 US presidential election, there were allegations that they managed to penetrate into the servers of the Democratic National Committee.

There were allegations, which were subsequently completely disproven. Russiagate was a hoax. It’s now been admitted even by the FBI and the American intelligence services. And what we are seeing today in Europe is a European version of Russiagate. In that case, the objective was to stop Trump from getting into the White House. And today, the kind of Euro Russiagate is aimed at all populist or anti-establishment parties that threaten the status quo and the establishment. Let’s not forget that just over a year ago in Romania, an entire election was annulled on grounds of alleged Russian interference, of Russia allegedly running some kind of disinformation scheme on TikTok that supposedly had convinced voters to vote for the independent populist candidate who ended up winning that first round of the elections. Well, they provided no evidence whatsoever for that alleged disinformation scheme. And even TikTok claimed that there was no evidence of this manipulation.

So you claim that the EU itself interfered in the election process in Romania. What’s the proof?

Well, I’ve read hundreds of pages of reports about this, and I tracked all the EU funding, all the EU money that goes to NGOs, media and universities across Europe to essentially promote pro-EU narratives and the Brussels agenda. What the EU is running here is a scheme very similar to what USAID has done for many years around the world, essentially sending money to NGOs and alleged independent media outlets in third countries to promote America’s economic and geopolitical interests. Now the European Union does exactly the same thing. It uses these funds to manipulate civil society in countries to promote its own interests and agenda. And the EU runs these schemes in member states, especially in countries that are ruled by Eurosceptic governments. In Hungary and Poland, the EU has channelled huge amounts of funds.

How much money is involved in this process annually?

The EU programme that is the key tool for what I would consider EU propaganda is the CERV programme, launched in 2021 with the explicit aim of promoting “European values”. But it’s promoting Brussels’s own very unique interpretation of those values, the idea of European integration and its intrinsic benefits. In the case of Hungary, through the CERV programme, around 40 million euros have been channelled to Hungary just over the course of the past few years.

In all 27 member states, what is the total amount?

The 2021–2027 budget allocated two billion euros for that. That’s quite a bit of money. We’re talking hundreds of millions of euros every year that are effectively channelled into what can only be described as propaganda programmes. I’m not saying that some of the projects that they’re funding aren’t actual work. Some are probably genuine NGO projects.

What percentage of it is considered propaganda, and how much of it is real work?

The propaganda aspect is by far where most of the money goes. I’ve looked at hundreds of projects, and most of them are really simply aimed at promoting the Brussels agenda.

What is the agenda? Can you name values that you consider part of that ideology?

I mean, the EU claims to promote “European values”, but on paper those values are very vague. Democracy, human rights, the struggle against discrimination — these are all concepts that most people support. The question is, how does one interpret these values? For example, when it comes to the struggle against discrimination, no one should be discriminated for the colour of their skin, or for their sexual orientation or whatever. But a very different thing is trying to impose norms and languages and behavioural attitudes on an entire society that don’t reflect what the prevailing social consensus is. And we’ve seen this, for example, with the attempt to impose a very maximalist interpretation of LGBT rights across Europe. We see it with the approach towards immigration. A lot of people are concerned about immigration, not necessarily for racist reasons, right? But the European Union conflates these two issues. It uses the struggle against discrimination to then promote these very liberal immigrationist values.

And when you’re trying to impose these values in a country where people clearly have a different set of them — where they have elected governments that reflect those values — and you’re trying to impose your own by channelling money to organizations that are largely dependent on that funding for their existence, and using them to promote your ideology while pretending that these are independent actors, well, in that case we’re faced with something very similar to what USAID was doing, which many would claim is a clear form of foreign interference, where you’re trying to change the political course in that country. So when you channel millions of euros to NGOs and media that are opposed to the elected government in a certain country, well, you’re effectively engaging in an attempt to destabilize or even to implement regime change.

How many NGOs, think tanks, or media outlets receive this financing from the European Commission annually?

We know that there are thousands of “NGOs” across Europe who receive money from the European Commission. It’s impossible to track the exact number, also because the definition of what exactly is an NGO isn’t clear, even in the EU’s own databases. But through the CERV programme alone the EU has supported, since 2021, more than 3,000 projects and thousands of NGOs. So it’s a very vast ecosystem. What has happened over the past decade is that, essentially, the political establishment has cultivated a fake civil society. How can you claim to be an NGO when most of your money comes from the political establishment, the political institutions, and in many cases, the European Union itself? You can’t claim to really be conveying the aspirations of civil society to the political institutions. What you’re doing, inevitably, is the opposite. You become a tool for the political establishment to convey their ideas and their ideology to public opinion. So it’s a literal inversion of what NGOs and civil society should do. The problem is that most of the NGOs that are operating today are not independent, but are simply extensions of the political establishment.

I would add that civil society should be heterogeneous, as the political life of the European Union is highly complex. What percentage of the financed NGOs or think tanks are conservative, liberal, or socialist? Is it a proportionate or a disproportionate scene?

I cannot find a single case when a conservative or Eurosceptic think tank received EU funding to promote Eurosceptic ideas. And I think this is a perfect example of just how profoundly anti-democratic this whole practice is. It completely skews the public debate because it artificially boosts certain ideas at the expense of others, at the expense of maybe other ideas that actually enjoy a genuine, organic support in civil society. A lot of people have issues with the EU, but these voices are often suppressed, marginalised, and increasingly censored, while others — often representing minority views — are artificially boosted. This is a profoundly anti-democratic practice because you’re trying to essentially superimpose an artificial civil society onto the real one. Then you’ve got all these NGOs demanding these policies that no one really wants, creating the illusion of an organic movement. I mean, a lot of what’s happening at the level of supposedly civil society is really completely fake.

In Hungary, we hear the voice of think tanks and NGOs financed from Brussels and the voice of the Hungarian government, because it finances its tools, too. But do you have a similar balanced set of opinions in Western Europe, for example, about the Ukrainian war?

No, not at all. We know from polls that have been carried out in a number of countries that the support for the EU-NATO strategy of this never-ending war is declining across all of Europe for obvious reasons. Ordinary people can see that this war isn’t going anywhere. And this is something that is damaging not just Ukraine, obviously, but also European societies and economies themselves. A great number of people oppose this war, but this isn’t reflected at all in the public debate, precisely because you’ve got these media institutions, you’ve got these NGOs, you’ve got also academia, and you’ve got universities, all of which receive on some level or another EU money, which are constantly promoting the pro-war narrative and the pro-NATO narrative at the expense of a diplomatic solution.

We’re not talking about Green Deal or whatever anymore, we’re talking about a war that has been raging on for four years, which the Brussels elite is intent on continuing to the last Ukrainian, even at the risk of dragging all of Europe into a potentially catastrophic war with Russia. Unfortunately, many security or defence think tanks or their members present themselves as being neutral experts. They’re always peddling the Brussels line, the EU line, the NATO line, but they are presented in the media as neutral, independent observers. But in most cases, these think tanks are funded by EU governments, by the European Commission and by the arms industry.

I quote you: “The Democracy Shield is just the latest vision in unfreedom: suppressing dissent speech under the pretext of defending democracy from foreign interference and fake news”. I suppose you fear that fact-checkers of the EU will become censors of free speech. Why are you afraid of this?

Because they will become censors.

We still use TikTok and Facebook freely, even if they employ fact-checkers and monitoring units.

We have several examples of people who have been de-platformed, or whose posts have been taken down as a result of the Digital Services Act (DSA), which is really an online censorship tool. We know that the big social media companies receive thousands of requests every month from the EU, from European governments, to take down this or that post. And the DSA itself has a tool which allows it to implement even faster censorship policies under elections. It’s called a rapid response system, and we know that they’ve used this in previous elections. They used this in Romania and in other elections, where a huge number of posts were taken down as a result of the DSA. And the idea is that any kind of opinion that they don’t like, they will claim that it is Russian disinformation, and that in order to “protect democracy” they have to take that information down. So, what we’re seeing is that the EU is escalating from simple propaganda and censorship to direct electoral interference.

These tools are first tested out on smaller countries, and then they tend to be applied across the board. And we know how desperate the elites are to cling to power and protect the status quo from these challenges that are arising from different parts. So, I think we can expect them to try to manipulate the outcome of the Hungarian elections. This is why, with the help of the think tank MCC Brussels, we have set up the Democracy Interference Observatory, through which we are monitoring the EU’s potential interference in the Hungarian elections and in other elections in the future. I think they’ve realised that overt forms of interference tend to backfire. But they have a lot of covert ways to try to influence public opinion, and I think they will try to use them. They will try to use the local NGOs. They will try to use foreign-funded media to influence the outcome. So we can expect them to try to pull off the same dirty tricks in Hungary as well.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

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