Can the EU's new Democracy Shield protect Europe from America?
It appears MAGA has successfully intimidated the Commission into defanging its new anti-disinformation tool proposed today.
“Our democracy is under attack,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told MEPs in her State of the European Union speech in September. “The rise in information manipulation and disinformation is dividing our societies. It is not only eroding trust in the truth – but also in democracy itself. This is why we urgently need the European Democracy Shield.”
That proposal to tackle disinformation and foreign election interference was put forward today, and in talking about it the Commission only wanted to talk about one foreign actor: Russia. “In addition to its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine, Russia is also escalating hybrid attacks, waging a battle of influence against Europe. The tactics used are reaching deep into the fabric of our societies, with potentially long-lasting impacts,” the Democracy Shield text reads. “By spreading deceitful narratives, sometimes including the manipulation and falsification of historical facts, they try to erode trust in democratic systems.” Russia is in fact the only country mentioned in the text.
Nobody at the Commission has dared mention the elephant in the room: that these attacks on European democracy are coming from both East and West. And while the EU has cut all its ties with Russia, its dependence on America has meant that the ones doing the interfering from the West have been able to intimidate the Commission into watering down its plans.
In her September speech, von der Leyen promised that the shield will “monitor and detect information manipulation and disinformation”, setting up a new European Centre for Democratic Resilience. She also promised a Media Resilience Programme to “support independent journalism and media literacy,” noting that, “the first step in an autocrat’s playbook is always to capture independent media. Because this enables backsliding and corruption to happen in the dark.”
This is very clearly what’s happening in America at the moment. So it’s no surprise that MAGA came out swinging against what it calls an EU effort at censorship. Republicans held a hearing in the US Congress in September called “Europe’s threat to American speech and innovation”, accusing the EU of trying to silence conservative voices in its quest to tackle disinformation. This is in the context of a wider US assault on the EU’s digital rules. In July the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee released a report calling the EU’s rules requiring social media companies to tackle disinformation a “foreign censorship threat” that must be stopped. “European censors” at the Commission and EU countries “target core political speech that is neither harmful nor illegal, attempting to stifle debate on topics such as immigration and the environment”, the report said. Their censorship is “largely one-sided” against conservatives, the report concludes. Republicans have even suggested that lawmakers who enforce the EU’s digital rules should face sanctions.
It appears these efforts at intimidation worked. What we ended up with in today’s proposal is more of a whimper than a roar – greatly watered down from what was initially envisioned not because of Russia but because of the foreign interferer who dare not be named.
Each planned item that the text lays out comes with assurances that freedom of expression will be respected. Language has been softened and actions have all been made voluntary. EU member states will not be obliged to participate in Democracy Shield.
A Commission official told the website Euractiv that that the weakening of Democracy Shield came from the top, with the cabinet of President von der Leyen revising the text. It was “softened so as not to upset the US in general”, the Commission source told Euractiv.
In the end the initiative doesn’t contain very much that is new, with many existing actions repackaged as new actually being old provisions in the Digital Services Act and the AI Act ( this is also the case for the supposedly new €5 million fact-checking programme).
The liberal Renew Europe group in the EU Parliament said today they will fight to strengthen this watered-down proposal. “The Commission’s communication is uninspiring and lacks determination,” said Austrian liberal MEP Helmut Brandstätter. “With Russia using all the tricks of hybrid warfare, China quietly playing along, and the US going after its closer allies, the communication needs to be more ambitious. We shall not allow Trump to blackmail us into betraying our values and interests.” he said. “The Parliament is preparing a report tailored to the geopolitical reality, and we will urge the Commission to turn its toothless communication into effective legislation.”
You will not hear such words in the Commission or in the Council of national governments. Our leaders are adamant about only mentioning Russia when they talk about these threats, even as the US government is blatantly engaged in regime change efforts in the EU. MAGA politicians are spreading disinformation in the EU and UK and promoting far-right opposition parties, but our centrist leaders are just rolling over and taking it. They are too scared to criticise the foreign power that controls this continent – but they are all too happy to criticise Russia, a power the EU has now completely decoupled from. By the time they find the courage to acknowledge what is happening it will probably be too late – they will have been voted out of office and the MAGA-supported far right will have come to power.
The examples are myriad. In May, US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem travelled to Poland to campaign for far-right opposition figure Karol Nawrocki, and thanks to that he was elected president. The endorsement wasn’t about who he is, but rather who he isn’t. He is not part of the centrist, rule-of-law-abiding governing majority in the EU. And it is that governing majority that the Trump regime wants to remove from power. “We do not have time to dance around the dangers that threaten our societies,” Noem said, blasting Europe’s current “weak” centrist leaders (can’t disagree with her there) and saying they are a “train wreck” who have “destroyed our countries.”
The implicit promise is clear: the people of Europe will be rewarded by America for putting the far right in power. “If you have elected a leader that will work with President Donald J. Trump, the Polish people will have an ally strong that will ensure that you will be able to fight off enemies that do not share your value,” Noem told the crowd. “You will continue to have a US presence here, a military presence, for Trump, that we can work together for the security of both of our nations.”
Noem’s intervention in Polish politics followed US Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February in which he excoriated European governments for supposed threats to free speech – making up wild lies about what is happening on this continent – before then meeting with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany party (and snubbing Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz). What has become clear since then is that MAGA’s crusade isn’t about free speech, it’s about giving their global far-right movement as much oxygen as possible without resistance. Just months after Vance’s lecturing, the Trump regime moved to shut down negative press coverage and even used Federal Communications Commission threats to have late-night host Jimmy Kimmel fired following his criticism of MAGA’s reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They are shutting down free speech domestically, while using the issue as a cudgel to intimidate European leaders with.
MAGA’s narrative about conservatives being repressed has taken hold in Europe, boosting the far-right opposition parties to the point where they are now leading the polls in Europe’s three largest countries: Germany, France and the United Kingdom. They are already in power in the fourth largest country, Italy.
Elon Musk, who for a while was the second most-powerful man in the US government, has been busy this year spreading disinformation about the UK. Musk used his social network, X, to call for a new election and demand UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer be imprisoned in January. He posted an online poll for his 210 million followers asking if “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Musk said Starmer was “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes” – a complete lie. At the time, Starmer criticised Musks’s “lies and misinformation” that he said were undermining UK democracy. But that was before Donald Trump took office and put Musk in charge of reorganising the US government. From that point on, Starmer couldn’t say a word against Musk even as he continued to spread disinformation in the UK.
That is the situation we’re in here in Europe. There is a massive attempt to spread disinformation and subvert democracy coming from both East and West, but that coming from the West has been way more effective and dangerous. Yet our continent’s dependency on America means that only the destabilisation efforts coming from the East can be acknowledged by our leaders.
The Trump regime’s strategy of supporting like-minded far-right leaders like Viktor Orban, Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Nigel Farage while working to undermine centre-right and centre-left leaders like Friedrich Merz, Donald Tusk, Emmanuel Macron and Keir Stramer, was unabashedly spelled out in a Substack post by the US State Department in May. Entitled “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe”, the post said sitting centrist European governments are waging an “aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself”. Europe must return to its Christian heritage, the US State Department says, and citizens should support those politicians who will do so. The far right is being persecuted when they should be supported, says the American government. “Christian nations like Hungary are unjustly labeled as authoritarians and human rights abusers.”
We cannot go on like this. As long as our EU leaders refuse to acknowledge that a country other than Russia could mean Europe harm, then any strategy like Democracy Shield is doomed to failure. They are not being honest with us, and we are all paying the price. If Democracy Shield cannot accurately describe the threat we are facing, then there is no way it can defend us from the forces in America that are spreading disinformation on this continent with the goal of regime change.