Voting Blind
On civil society, information, and why Europe’s resilience fails between crises
On Tuesday this week, Denmark’s snap election delivered an ambiguous verdict. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had called it in February, several months before she needed to. She was hoping that her resolute handling of the Greenland crisis would strengthen her hand: her refusal to bend to Donald Trump’s threats and tariffs, her warning that a forced American takeover of the Arctic territory would mean the end of NATO. Her Social Democrats remained the largest party, and she may yet form a government for a third term. But the party recorded its worst vote share in over a century, and neither the left nor the right bloc won a majority. The temporary boost in Frederiksen’s approval ratings following the Greenland standoff did not translate into lasting electoral gains. Voters, according to Danish analysts, were more focused on the cost of living, housing, pensions, and domestic policy than on geopolitics. As one observer put it, there was broad consensus on Greenland’s place in the Kingdom; the election was decided by other concerns.
Three weeks from now, Hungary goes to the polls. Viktor Orbán, Europe’s longest-serving populist leader and the man whose political playbook became a template for the MAGA movement, faces the toughest election of his sixteen-year incumbency. A centre-right challenger, Péter Magyar of the Tisza party, is leading in most surveys. If Orbán loses, it will not merely be a change of government in a small Central European country. It will be the collapse of what a Princeton professor has called the “proof of concept” that MAGA-style politics can work. But Orbán is not going quietly. Unable to campaign on his record, after sixteen years that have made Hungary the most corrupt country in the European Union and one of its poorest, he has turned his entire campaign apparatus toward a different project: convincing Hungarians to fear an imminent military attack from Ukraine. This is an entirely fabricated threat. Ukraine, fighting for its survival against Russia, has neither the capacity nor the motive to open a second front against a NATO member. But the campaign to make it seem real is operating on a scale that has no precedent in European democratic politics, and it deserves close attention.
These two elections, one just concluded and one approaching, frame a question that runs through everything I have been writing about in this series: what does democratic resilience actually look like in practice?
The answer, I want to argue, is not what we might expect. It is not primarily about institutions, although institutions matter. It is not primarily about defence spending, although defence spending matters. It is about whether Europe can build a civic culture that is robust enough to sustain democratic engagement between crises, not only during them.
The Danish result illustrates the problem with uncomfortable clarity. When Trump threatened to take Greenland by force, Frederiksen’s approval ratings surged. Europeans rallied behind Denmark. Eight NATO countries issued a joint statement of solidarity. Thousands marched in Copenhagen and Nuuk. For a few weeks in January, it looked as though external pressure was forging exactly the kind of pan-European solidarity that federalists have long dreamed of. But the moment the crisis subsided, voters returned to domestic concerns, and the temporary solidarity did not convert into durable political capital. Sovereignty, it seems, is a powerful mobiliser. But it is not a lasting one. And a civil society that only engages when threatened from outside is not resilient. It is reactive.
This is the gap I want to explore. In my earlier article “The Shield Europe Must Build,” I argued that Europe needs its own sovereign defence capability, separate from NATO’s command structures, built on harmonised procurement and genuine strategic autonomy. In “Building European Resilience,” I documented how foreign influence operations, from both Russia and the United States, target European societies through funding networks, disinformation campaigns, and the strategic amplification of divisive narratives. What I did not address in either piece, and what I want to address now, is the democratic dimension of both projects. You cannot build a sovereign defence without democratic legitimacy. You cannot build resilience against manipulation if we, the public, are disengaged, uninformed, or confined to information environments designed to fragment us.
The European Union has begun to recognise this. In November 2025, the Commission launched the European Democracy Shield alongside a new EU Strategy for Civil Society, and in February 2026, the European Centre for Democratic Resilience began its work. These are welcome steps. The Democracy Shield represents something genuinely new: instead of framing European citizens as the passive beneficiaries of top-down democratic protection, it positions them as central agents in defending their own democracies. It speaks of a “whole-of-society approach.” It acknowledges that resilience cannot be built by institutions alone.
But the critics have a point. The Democracy Shield frames threats to European democracy almost entirely in terms of external interference. Foreign disinformation, foreign funding of political parties, foreign manipulation of elections. These are real threats, and I documented many of them in my resilience piece. But they are not the whole picture. Foreign influence campaigns do not operate in a vacuum. They succeed because they find fertile soil: economic inequality, political frustration, a sense that institutions are remote and unresponsive, and, increasingly, information environments that reward outrage over deliberation. If Europe’s democratic shield only looks outward, it will miss half the battlefield.
This is not an abstract concern. Civil Society Week 2026, held in Brussels just last week, brought together over a thousand voices, from grassroots activists and youth representatives to EU policymakers. The message from the floor was concrete: civil society organisations across Europe face restrictive laws, disinformation campaigns, underfunding, and declining public trust. The space for democratic participation is narrowing in precisely the places where the new institutions most need it to expand.
Let me give three concrete examples of what this gap looks like in practice. All are happening right now. They represent different modes of the same problem: in two cases, information operations designed to reshape how people understand events; in the third, a slow-building strategic pressure that receives almost no public attention at all.
As I write this, the Latvian Ministry of Defence has publicly stated that Russia is conducting what it calls a large-scale, coordinated information operation against Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The context is this: Ukrainian drones have been striking Russian oil infrastructure at Ust-Luga and Primorsk in the Leningrad region over the past week. Some drones appear to have strayed off course, with one crashing into a power plant chimney in northeastern Estonia and another detonating after entering Latvian airspace, incidents confirmed by Baltic officials. Russia has seized on these events to promote the narrative that the Baltic states are actively enabling Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory. According to the Latvian Ministry of Defence, the purpose of the campaign is to discredit NATO, undermine trust in Baltic state institutions, and split society, with messaging primarily aimed at Russian-speaking residents and young people. Russian-language media commentary has included calls for retaliatory strikes and rhetoric echoing the justifications used before the invasion of Ukraine.
The Baltic governments have categorically denied any involvement in Ukrainian military operations, stating that their support for Ukraine is limited to military equipment, humanitarian aid, and financial assistance. Whether or not the specific accusations have any basis, the information campaign itself is documented and acknowledged by the governments being targeted.
This is textbook information warfare. And it is barely making headlines in Western European media.
The Hungarian campaign is something else entirely, and something worse. What Orbán is doing is not merely propaganda in the conventional sense. It is what one Atlantic writer this week called “the world’s first post-reality campaign,” a coordinated effort to build an entire alternative reality using the full apparatus of the state, amplified by Russian intelligence assets and endorsed by foreign leaders.
The mechanics are extraordinary. In Budapest, posters of Orbán are almost nowhere to be seen. Instead, the city is blanketed with posters of Volodymyr Zelensky alongside the slogan “Don’t let Zelensky have the last laugh,” or images grouping Zelensky with Magyar and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen under the words “They are the risk. Fidesz is the safe choice.” On TikTok, where new pro-Fidesz accounts appear daily, AI-generated videos show a deepfake Zelensky sitting on a golden toilet counting money and snorting cocaine, or a deepfake Magyar apparently singing the Ukrainian national anthem or declaring that his masters in Brussels have forbidden him from defending the homeland. One genre of video shows a Hungarian girl weeping as her blindfolded father, in a Hungarian military uniform, is executed in Ukraine. During a Fidesz march on 15 March, a group at the front of the crowd carried a banner declaring “We won’t be a Ukrainian colony.”
The state has backed this narrative with action. In February, Orbán sent Hungarian soldiers to guard the country’s oil and gas infrastructure, allegedly to prevent a Ukrainian attack, for which there was no evidence. In March, Hungarian counterterrorism authorities seized two trucks owned by a Ukrainian bank on a routine cash-transport run from Vienna, arrested seven bank employees, and reportedly injected one of them with what may have been truth serum. All seven were later released because there was no evidence against them. But the Hungarian government confiscated eighty-two million dollars in gold and cash, which it has not returned. When the operation provoked Zelensky into making a half-joking threat toward Orbán, Fidesz reckoned this a success: it gave them another few days’ worth of material.
And behind this domestic machinery, Russia has deployed its own. The Financial Times has identified a team from the Social Design Agency, a Kremlin-backed IT company whose operations were exposed by the now-dismantled US State Department’s Global Engagement Center in 2023, working in Budapest to produce AI-generated content and circulate it through existing networks of trolls and bots. One Russian network has circulated doctored screenshots of the English-language news site Euronews, with fabricated quotes attributed to Magyar. According to the Washington Post investigation published last week, Russian intelligence even proposed staging a fake assassination attempt against Orbán to generate sympathy, a strategy they codenamed “Gamechanger.” Meanwhile, Orbán’s foreign minister regularly calls his Russian counterpart after EU meetings to keep Moscow informed, and has used the channel to arrange political favours for pro-Russian politicians in neighbouring countries.
A Budapest think tank director who has tracked Hungarian politics for years told a visiting journalist that the shift is qualitative, not just quantitative. In 2022, Orbán campaigned on keeping Hungary out of the war. Now he is telling Hungarians that they are under imminent threat of attack. The difference matters. One is a policy position. The other is a fabrication.
The third example is closer to home for me. Norway’s sovereignty over Svalbard, the Arctic archipelago as large as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg combined, has been under sustained and escalating pressure from Russia over many years. Norway holds full and absolute sovereignty under the 1920 Svalbard Treaty, a point that is legally settled and not disputed by any signatory state. But Russia has increasingly challenged the way Norway exercises that sovereignty. In 2020, Foreign Minister Lavrov wrote to his Norwegian counterpart that Norway’s approach was “inadmissible.” In late 2024, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson warned that Norway and its allies were “dragging Svalbard into the conflict in Ukraine.” Russia’s deputy prime minister has drawn parallels between Russian interests in Svalbard and the logic used to justify Russian military operations in Ukraine. The pattern includes expanded Russian activity in the settlement at Barentsburg, Victory Day parades emphasising Soviet-era nostalgia, and efforts to build partnerships with BRICS nations for research on the archipelago.
Svalbard’s strategic importance is difficult to overstate. Its location between the North Pole and the Kola Peninsula, which houses Russia’s nuclear submarine fleet, makes it central to Arctic security. Critical European communication infrastructure, including satellite ground stations, operates from the archipelago. Analysts at institutions including the Atlantic Council, the Arctic Institute, and CSIS have described Svalbard as a site of grey-zone tactics, diplomatic and military activities designed to push the boundaries of what is legally permissible without crossing into open confrontation.
And yet, in Norwegian public discourse, the Svalbard question is met with a shrug and a one-line answer: Norway has sovereignty according to the treaty. No further discussion needed. The rest of us in Europe know even less.
I want to be clear about why I am raising these three examples together. It is not because I think a Russian attack on Estonia or Svalbard is imminent. Estonian intelligence itself has assessed that Russia does not intend to attack NATO this year. And Hungary is not under any threat from Ukraine whatsoever. The point is different, and it goes to the heart of this article. Here are three situations in which hostile actors are actively working to undermine European sovereignty and democratic judgement. In the Baltics, through a coordinated information operation targeting specific populations within EU and NATO member states. In Hungary, through a campaign of cognitive warfare waged by a government against its own citizens, amplified by Russian intelligence and endorsed by the United States. In Svalbard, through sustained grey-zone pressure on a strategically vital territory. And in all three cases we, the European public, are barely aware that it is happening, or, in Hungary’s case, are being deliberately prevented from understanding it.
Why? Is it because our media institutions have decided we cannot handle the truth? Is it fear that public discussion would escalate the conflict? Is it that the stories are too complex, too remote, too far from the kitchen-table concerns that drive elections? Or is it that our information environment, dominated by platforms engineered for engagement rather than understanding, is structurally incapable of sustaining our attention on threats that develop slowly and require context to understand?
Whatever the answer, the consequence is the same. We are going to the ballot, as Danish voters did this week, without understanding the security environment in which our votes take effect. We are making choices about defence spending, foreign policy orientation, and alliance structures without knowing what is happening on our own continent. And in Hungary, voters are being asked to make those choices inside an information environment that has been deliberately engineered to make informed choice impossible, a government using state resources, foreign intelligence assets, and AI-generated content to build terror of an enemy that does not exist. This is not a failure of civil society alone. It is a failure of the entire information chain, from intelligence services to governments to media to platforms to us, the citizens. And until we address it honestly, no institutional shield, however well designed, will be sufficient.
And yet, even in this information vacuum, something unexpected has happened in recent months that suggests European political instincts may be more robust than the information environment would lead us to expect. Europe’s far-right parties, many of which built their political brands on alignment with Trump’s MAGA movement, have come under growing pressure to distance themselves from their American patron, producing what appears to be a significant, if uneven, tension within the international populist movement.
The trigger was sovereignty. When Trump threatened to seize Greenland by force, imposed tariffs on eight European allies, launched a military operation in Venezuela, and then attacked Iran in the strikes of late February, he put European nationalists in an impossible position. Jordan Bardella, president of France’s National Rally, accused Trump of “a return to imperial ambitions.” Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, once praised by Trump as “beautiful and powerful,” called the strike on a girls’ school in Iran a “massacre” and declared the wider campaign “outside the scope of international law.” Even Nigel Farage, who had campaigned for Trump in the United States, called the Greenland gambit “a very hostile act.” In the European Parliament, far-right lawmakers who had reliably supported pro-American positions voted to halt the EU-US trade pact, describing Trump’s threats as “coercion.”
The Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev captured the underlying dynamic precisely. Trump, he observed, is “a nationalist who does not understand nationalism, particularly the nationalism of others,” a nationalist “without history.” Where Trump sees real estate, European nationalists see sacred ground. The principles of land and borders carry visceral memories on a continent where borders have been redrawn by force within living memory, or within a grandparent’s memory, which in political terms amounts to the same thing.
This is worth pausing on. The irony is extraordinary. These are parties that have built their political identity on opposing European integration, on defending national sovereignty against Brussels, on insisting that decisions should be made closer to the people. And yet, when a foreign power actually threatened the sovereignty of a European country, not through regulation or fiscal policy but through the raw language of territorial acquisition and economic coercion, they instinctively defended Europe. In the European Parliament, far-right lawmakers voted to halt the Turnberry trade deal with the United States, a deal their centrist and centre-right colleagues had negotiated. They did so not because they had suddenly become pro-EU federalists, but because their deepest political instinct, sovereignty, demanded it.
The situation bears an ironic resemblance, as one commentator noted, to the predicament of Europe’s Marxist-Leninist parties during the Cold War. The Soviet regime placed great hopes in those parties, only to discover that they had their own interests, their own histories, and their own electorates to answer to. The MAGA movement is discovering something similar: you cannot export nationalism. Nationalism, by definition, is local.
It may not last. One analyst has warned that “a successful culture war does not require Trump sycophancy” and that American and European MAGA networks continue to cooperate at the operational level, particularly on issues like immigration and opposition to climate regulation. And the most important exception demands attention. Orbán has refused to utter a word of criticism against Trump, clinging to the relationship as his electoral lifeline even as it becomes a liability at home. At CPAC Hungary on 21 March, the event opened with a video montage set to eerie music, splicing footage from the war in Ukraine with images of Magyar, Zelensky, and von der Leyen, labelled with the Hungarian words for “war,” “blackmail,” and “hazard.” Trump endorsed Orbán by video. The American headliners mostly stayed away, replaced by European far-right figures and, remarkably, Georgia’s Irakli Kobakhidze, elected amid allegations of electoral fraud as a candidate of the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party. Alice Weidel of the AfD attacked Ukraine from the podium as “the most corrupt regime on Earth,” apparently without irony, given that she was speaking inside the most corrupt state in the European Union. Argentina’s Javier Milei flew from South America to praise Orbán, a man who has built one of Europe’s most repressive societies, as a beacon of light. The event was closed to independent media.
Orbán’s case matters because it shows what happens when a leader’s political survival depends entirely on the external alliance: he cannot afford the European reflex, even when his own electorate may be moving in that direction. Hungary was actually invaded, after all, in living memory, by tanks sent from Moscow, not Kyiv. In 1956, the Soviet army came to Budapest to crush the anti-Communist Hungarian revolution. To win, Orbán must corrupt that searing national memory and substitute fear of Ukraine. At a large rally in Budapest earlier this month, Magyar started the crowd chanting “Russians go home,” a phrase that reaches directly into that history. If Orbán loses in April, it will suggest that voters eventually punish the dependency, and that fabricated reality cannot survive contact with lived experience. If he wins, it will demonstrate that the MAGA model can survive in Europe under the right institutional conditions, even when the broader movement fractures around it, and that a post-reality campaign, backed by sufficient state resources, foreign intelligence, and AI-generated content, can override democratic judgement.
But the broader pattern is worth noting. It suggests that European political reflexes, even among those who claim to reject the idea of a common European identity, may run deeper than ideological alliance. When forced to choose between MAGA solidarity and the sovereignty of a fellow European country, most of Europe’s nationalists chose Europe. Whether this represents a durable shift or a temporary divergence driven by circumstance remains to be seen. But it is worth watching.
If European political instincts prove more resilient than expected, the same cannot be said for the information infrastructure through which those instincts are shaped, tested, and manipulated.
On 25 March, two days before I write this, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury found Meta and Google negligent in the design of Instagram and YouTube, ruling that the platforms were a substantial factor in causing harm to a young plaintiff. The jury awarded six million dollars in combined compensatory and punitive damages, with Meta bearing seventy per cent of the liability. According to reporting on the trial, internal Meta documents presented to the jury showed the company’s strategy in blunt terms: one memo stated that to succeed with teenagers, the company needed to recruit them as pre-teens. The plaintiff’s lawyers had made a deliberate strategic choice: instead of arguing about the content users saw, which would have run into Section 230 protections, they argued that the platforms themselves were defectively designed. The jury agreed.
The verdict came one day after a separate jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay three hundred and seventy-five million dollars for failing to protect children from predators on its platforms. Legal commentators have described the litigation as the social media industry’s equivalent of the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s. Both companies have said they will appeal.
Why does this matter for European democracy? Because the same design features that hook teenagers are the design features that amplify political polarisation. The infinite scroll, the autoplay, the notification systems, the algorithmic amplification of content that provokes emotional reactions: these are not neutral conduits for information. They are engineering choices, made to maximise engagement, with political radicalisation as a predictable and documented side effect. In my resilience article, I cited research showing that TikTok’s algorithm directed seventy-eight per cent of political content toward AfD-aligned material in the lead-up to the German federal election, compared with sixty-four per cent on X. That is not an accident of content. It is a consequence of design. And in Hungary, the same platforms serve as the delivery mechanism for AI-generated deepfakes of opposition leaders and fabricated war footage, with new pro-Fidesz accounts appearing daily and no meaningful platform intervention. The government’s principal digital content producer, Megafon, reportedly operated on a budget of fourteen and a half million euros in 2024, drawn from public funds, while pro-government actors have used AI tools to generate an entire fabricated six-hundred-page document presented as the opposition’s official programme, complete with policies the opposition has never proposed.
The European Union has attempted to address this through the Digital Services Act and the AI Act, and my earlier article on eIDAS 2.0 and the EU Digital Identity Wallet explored how Europe is building its own digital infrastructure. But regulation of platform content, however necessary, does not address the underlying problem. The Meta verdict has established, at least in one American jurisdiction, that the problem is structural. The platforms are designed to be addictive. Addiction is not a bug. It is the business model.
If Europe is serious about democratic resilience, it must treat platform design as a democratic infrastructure question. When we form our political opinions inside systems engineered to maximise engagement, outrage, and division, we are not equipped for democratic deliberation. The European public sphere that Jürgen Habermas spent his career arguing for, and that I explored in my recent article following his death, cannot exist inside information architectures that are optimised for the opposite of deliberation.
But there is another side to this story, and it is more hopeful. Social media is not only a vector for manipulation. It can also be a vehicle for democratic mobilisation, and some of the most powerful recent examples come from within Europe. In Slovakia, tens of thousands of citizens mobilised through social media to protest Prime Minister Robert Fico’s pro-Russian policies, marching under the slogan “Slovakia is Europe.” The movement spread to diaspora communities in Vienna, Prague, and Berlin. In Denmark, the Greenland solidarity protests were organised and amplified online. Across Europe, the anti-war demonstrations following the Iran strikes drew tens of thousands, coordinated through the same platforms that carry disinformation. And in Hungary, Magyar’s Tisza party, expecting further cyberattacks after its membership database was hacked and members’ private information dumped online, has built an analogue backup system for its internal communications, a measure that now looks prescient given reporting this week that the Hungarian government itself was behind the hack.
The lesson is not that social media is inherently good or bad for democracy. It is that design determines outcomes. A platform engineered to maximise time spent and emotional arousal will tend to amplify polarisation. A platform engineered to facilitate informed discussion and cross-border exchange could serve European democracy rather than undermining it. The question is not whether we use social media. It is whether the social media we use is designed to serve democracy or to erode it. And whether Europe has the political will to demand the difference.
The threads I have been following across this series, European defence, foreign influence, digital sovereignty, cultural identity, the erosion of international law, are converging. They are converging because they are, at root, the same question asked from different angles: can Europe act as a coherent political community in a world that is actively working to prevent it from doing so?
The Danish election suggests that geopolitical crisis alone will not sustain that community. The emerging tensions between Europe’s far right and the MAGA movement suggest that European political reflexes may run deeper than many assumed, even among those who claim to reject them. The Hungarian election, three weeks away, will test whether the MAGA model can survive contact with the ballot box in the country where it was most fully implemented, and whether a post-reality campaign, backed by the combined resources of a captured state, a foreign intelligence service, and the international far right, can override the democratic instincts of a population that still remembers what a real invasion looks like. The Meta verdict suggests that the information environment in which all of this plays out is not neutral ground but contested terrain, shaped by engineering decisions made in Silicon Valley boardrooms.
And the EU’s own Democracy Shield, for all its good intentions, reveals the gap between institutional ambition and democratic reality. A shield can protect. But who guards it? Who ensures that it serves citizens rather than merely managing them? Who provides the democratic scrutiny, the local knowledge, the grassroots legitimacy that no Brussels institution can generate on its own?
The answer is civil society. Not civil society as a polite abstraction, but as the lived practice of democratic engagement: the local organisations, the independent media, the watchdog groups, the cultural institutions, the unions, the volunteer networks that together constitute the connective tissue of democracy. These are the structures that make the difference between a population and a polity. Between a market and a community. Between consumers of political content and citizens of a political project.
Europe has spent the last year building impressive institutional infrastructure. ReArm Europe, the SAFE procurement instrument, the Democracy Shield, the Centre for Democratic Resilience, the Civil Society Strategy. These are real achievements. But institutions without an engaged public are architecture without inhabitants. The missing pillar of European resilience is not another institution. It is the cultivation of a democratic culture in which we understand ourselves as European, have the tools and the information environment to resist manipulation, and can hold the new institutions to account.
That is a harder project than building a defence alliance or launching a digital identity wallet. It requires investment in civic education, in independent media across European languages, in cross-border civil society networks, in platform regulation that addresses design rather than merely content, and in the political courage to acknowledge that the threats to European democracy are not only external. Some of them are homegrown, nourished by inequality, frustration, and the systematic erosion of the public spaces in which democratic deliberation once took place. Hungary shows what happens when a government deliberately accelerates that erosion: you end up with citizens who cannot distinguish between a real threat and a fabricated one, who go to the ballot carrying fears that were manufactured for them.
The Meta verdict has opened a door. If American courts can hold platforms accountable for design choices that harm individual users, European institutions can hold them accountable for design choices that harm democratic societies. The Digital Services Act is a start. But Europe needs to go further: to insist that platforms operating in European markets meet standards not only of content moderation but of democratic compatibility. To fund European alternatives, as I argued in my article on European streaming services, that serve European languages, cultures, and public discourse. To treat the information environment with the same seriousness that it now treats defence procurement.
None of this will be easy. Platform regulation faces resistance from the technology industry, from governments wary of being accused of censorship, and from a public that has grown accustomed to services that are free precisely because we are the product. Civic education requires sustained investment over generations, not electoral cycles. Cross-border civil society networks need funding models that do not make them dependent on the very institutions they are supposed to hold to account. These are real obstacles, and acknowledging them is part of taking the project seriously.
The Chatham House analyst who surveyed Europe’s populist landscape this month put the stakes clearly: whether in office or not, the far right is increasingly influential in shaping European policy. Only the Covid pandemic temporarily halted the populists’ momentum, and it has returned, fuelled by the energy crisis, the backlash against climate policies, renewed migration flows, and Trump’s return to the White House. Europe can counter this. But it cannot do so with institutions alone. It requires us, the public, to understand what is at stake and to have the means, the information, and the platforms to participate in shaping our own future.
Danish voters went to the polls this week and made their choices based on the concerns they could see. Hungarian voters will do the same in three weeks, but in an information environment that has been deliberately constructed to ensure they cannot see clearly, a landscape of AI-generated deepfakes, fabricated threats, seized bank trucks, confiscated gold, and a foreign intelligence team embedded in their capital producing content designed to keep the incumbent in power. In both cases, the question is not whether they voted well or badly. It is whether they had the information they needed to make an informed choice about the world their votes would shape. Until we can answer that question honestly, the most important shield Europe needs remains unbuilt.
This article is part of a series on European integration, sovereignty, and democratic culture. It builds on arguments developed in “The Shield Europe Must Build,” “Building European Resilience,” “Nobody Is Minding the Law,” “Ukraine, Svalbard, and the Purpose of Norway’s Wealth,” “The Invisible Plumbing of a Continent,” and “In Memory of the European Public Sphere.” All are available on this Substack.
I write with the assistance of Claude, an AI tool developed by Anthropic. The arguments, perspectives, and editorial choices are my own. I believe in transparency about the tools we use, especially when writing about the information environment.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/hungary-first-post-reality-political-campaign/686565/?gift=hVZeG3M9DnxL4CekrWGK312TecTdc74pNhjwv58Htzw&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share