In the 2017 French presidential campaign, Marine Le Pen praised her patron Putin. She finished second in the first round of elections that April, defeating every candidate from France’s traditional parties. Her opponent in the second round was Emmanuel Macron, whom Russian propaganda insinuated was the gay candidate of the “gay lobby.” In the second round, Le Pen received 34% of the ballots. Though she lost to Macron, she did better than any other far Right candidate in the history of postwar France.
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To support the Front National was to attack the European Union. France was, after Germany, the EU’s most important member, and Le Pen the EU’s most powerful critic. In 2013, Russia’s financing of the Front National seemed much more likely to alter the future of the EU than its support of Nigel Farage and “Brexit,” his project to remove Britain from the European Union. Farage, like Le Pen, Spencer, and Trump, supported Putin during his turn to Eurasia. On July 8, 2013, Farage claimed on RT that the “European project is actually beginning to die.”
The first order of business for Russian foreign policy in the United Kingdom was actually Scottish separatism. The Scottish National Party was urging Scots to vote for independence in a referendum. In the weeks before it was held on September 18, 2014, Russian media falsely suggested that Scotland would lose its health service and its football team if it remained in Great Britain. After a majority of Scottish voters elected to remain in the United Kingdom, videos appeared on the internet that seemed to cast doubt about the validity of the vote. One of them showed actual vote rigging in Russia, presented as Scotland. These videos were then promoted over Twitter by accounts based in Russia. Then a Russian official proclaimed that the result “was a total falsification.” Although no actual irregularities were reported, roughly a third of Scottish voters gained the impression that something fraudulent had taken place. It would have been a victory for Russia had Scotland left the United Kingdom; but it was also a victory for Russia if the inhabitants of the United Kingdom came to distrust their institutions. After the Conservative Party won the May 2015 general election in the United Kingdom, RT published an opinion piece on its website claiming that the British electoral system was rigged.
Although Britain’s Conservative Party could form a government by itself after those elections, it was divided on the issue of Britain’s membership in the European Union. In order to end the intra-party dispute, Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to a non-binding national referendum on the question. This was extremely good news for Moscow, although it was not entirely a surprise. Russia had been preparing for such a possibility for some time. In 2012, Russian intelligence had founded, in Britain, a front organization called the Conservative Friends of Russia. One of its founding members, the British lobbyist Matthew Elliott, served as the chief executive of Vote Leave, the official organization making the case for a British exit from the EU. Nigel Farage, leader of the political party founded on the program of leaving the EU, kept appearing on RT, and expressed his admiration for Putin. One of his senior staffers took part in a Russian smear campaign against the president of Lithuania, who had criticized Putin.
All of the major Russian television channels, including RT, supported a vote to leave the EU in the weeks before the June 23, 2016, poll. A persuasion campaign on the internet, although unnoticed at the time, was probably more important. Russian internet trolls, live people who participated in exchanges with British voters, and Russian Twitter bots, computer programs that sent out millions of targeted messages, engaged massively on behalf of the Leave campaign. Four hundred and nineteen Twitter accounts that posted on Brexit were localized to Russia’s Internet Research Agency—later, every single one of them would also post on behalf of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. About a third of the discussion of Brexit on Twitter was generated by bots—and more than 90% of the bots tweeting political material were not located in the United Kingdom. Britons who considered their choices had no idea at the time that they were reading material disseminated by bots, nor that the bots were part of a Russian foreign policy to weaken their country. The margin of the vote was 52% for leaving and 48% for staying.
This time, no Russian voice questioned the result, presumably since the voting had gone the way Moscow had wished. Brexit was a triumph for Russian foreign policy, and a sign that a cyber campaign directed from Moscow could change reality.
For some time, Russian politicians had been urging Britain to separate from the European Union. In 2015 Konstantin Kosachev, the chairman of the international affairs committee of the Duma, had instructed the British about the “myth” that the European Union was “infallible and invulnerable.” After the referendum, Vladimir Putin provided a soothing argument in favor of the disintegration of the EU: that the British had been exploited by others. In fact, many of the districts of Great Britain most heavily subsidized by the EU voted to leave it. Putin gently supported the misunderstandings and prejudices that led to things falling apart: “No one wants to feed and subsidize weaker economies, support other states, whole peoples—it is an obvious fact.” Moscow had weaponized the fable of the wise nation. In fact, Britain had never been a state that had decided to support others, but a collapsing empire whose statehood was rescued by European integration. Pervyi Kanal, the most important Russian television station, soothingly confirmed the myth that Britain could go it alone because it had always done so: “For this nation it is important that none of its alliances or commitments are binding.” Under the mistaken impression that they had a history as a nation-state, the British (the English, mainly) voted themselves into an abyss where Russia awaited.
Russia’s support of Austrian enemies of the EU was ostentatious. Like Great Britain and France, Austria was the metropole of an old European empire that had joined the integration process. Austria had been the heart of the Habsburg monarchy, and then during the 1920s and 1930s a failed nation-state, then for seven years a part of Nazi Germany. Some of the leaders of its Freiheitliche party were connected by family or ideology (or both) to the Nazi period. This was the case with Johann Gudenus, who studied in Moscow and spoke Russian.
During the 2016 Austrian presidential campaign, the Freiheitliche were negotiating a cooperation agreement with Putin’s party in Russia, apparently in the expectation that their candidate Norbert Hofer would win. He almost did. In April he won the first round of the election. He narrowly lost the second round, which was then repeated after a claim of electoral violations. In December 2016, Hofer lost the second round again. He did take 46% of the total vote, the most a Freiheitliche candidate had received in an Austrian national election.
As in France, Russia’s candidate did not win, but performed far better than would have been expected when Russia’s campaign to destroy the EU began. In December 2016, Freiheitliche leaders flew to Moscow to sign the cooperation agreement they had negotiated with Putin’s political party. In October 2017, the Freiheitliche won 26% in Austria’s parliamentary elections, and then joined a coalition government that December. A far Right party in open partnership with Moscow was helping to govern an EU member.