FIMI narratives in the 2024 European elections’ campaign

During the 2024 European elections’ campaign the Russia's foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) ecosystem deployed an unprecedented volume of disinformation content. Yet the narratives circulated across EU member states looked strikingly different. How can a single adversarial actor produce narratives that feel native to so many distinct national contexts? This paper argues that the apparent diversity masks a single underlying schema, namely a constant villain template (the EU and/ or the relevant national government as Brussels' proxy), applied through calibrated victim templates that are adapted to specific economic anxieties, historical memories and cultural identities of a target society. Drawing on the concepts of strategic resonance, and narrative laundering, this paper theorizes how a centralized adversarial strategy generates nationally specific outputs without sacrificing strategic coherence. Three research questions guide the analysis: 1) what are the dominant FIMI narratives across the case studies? 2) how are shared narrative types instantiated as nationally specific micro-narratives, and what accounts for variation? 3) what structural features characterize dominant problem narratives, and what political functions do they serve? The central hypothesis is that cross-national variation in FIMI narratives is best explained by the tactical adaptation of a common narrative schema to national conditions of strategic resonance. Accordingly the adversary is not writing different scripts for different countries, but casting the same script with different national characters. Empirically, the paper employs a most-different systems comparative design across four EU countries (France, Germany, Poland, Slovakia) selected to maximize variation in geopolitical position, domestic political context and FIMI receptivity. The methodology combines narrative analysis of a large dataset of FIMI incidents with a three-level analytical framework (metanarrative → narrative → micro-narrative), and a narrative structure template (villain, victim, hero, plot, moral).