The Russiagate playbook fails in Bulgaria

The EU-NATO establishment once again attempted to weaponise the Russiagate narrative in Bulgaria’s Sunday elections — but this time a Romanian-style scenario seems unlikely

I’ve written for Compact about how the EU-NATO establishment once again attempted to weaponise the Russiagate narrative in Bulgaria’s Sunday elections — but failed.

In the run-up to the vote, Bulgarian authorities and their EU partners followed the usual script that has become standard in every European election — especially in the presence on the ballot of a candidate critical of official stances on Ukraine, Russia, the EU or NATO — raising the alarm about alleged Russian interference in the electoral process. This included accusations that pro-Kremlin foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) outlets were pushing narratives designed to tilt the result in Radev’s favor. The pro-EU ruling parties even formally requested EU assistance to counter “foreign disinformation” by activating the Digital Services Act’s (DSA) rapid response system.

The aim in these cases is two-fold: on the one hand, to justify the suppression of online speech through the DSA; but perhaps more importantly to pre-emptively delegitimise — and potentially overturn — an electoral outcome that yields the “wrong” result. This is what happened in November 2024, when Romanian presidential candidate Călin Georgescu’s first-round election victory was annulled by the Romanian Constitutional Court on grounds of Russian interference in the absence of any credible, publicly verifiable evidence.

The target in Bulgaria’s cases was Rumen Radev — former president, outspoken critic of the EU-NATO strategy in Ukraine and advocate of closer ties with Russia — whose Progressive Bulgaria party was set to win the election. Before Sunday’s vote, Radev himself warned that his party’s anticipated victory might be compromised by “the Romanian model”.

But the sheer scale of Radev’s victory makes a Romanian-style scenario unlikely: his party won one of the largest shares for a single party in Bulgaria’s democratic history, and enough for an absolute majority in the new parliament.

Nevertheless, what we witnessed in the lead-up to this election was the latest iteration of a political template that has become a recurring feature of European electoral life. When a candidate inconvenient to Brussels appears likely to win, the apparatus of “disinformation” monitoring and “foreign interference” response is mobilised — not after the election, but before it, in ways that directly shape the information environment in which voters make their choices.

The pattern is consistent enough to constitute a system. In Romania, Georgescu’s surprise first-round lead was met not with political competition but with institutional cancellation, backed by EU-level pressure and a media campaign that treated unverified intelligence assessments as established fact. In Hungary, ahead of last week’s elections, the Western political-media establishment saturated the information space with warnings about Kremlin meddling. In Slovakia, Robert Fico’s return to power in 2023 was accompanied by nearly identical warnings. In each case, the Russiagate framing served a dual function: to justify suppression of political content under the cover of “protecting democracy” and to delegitimise the result if the wrong candidate won.

Read the article here.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

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