FIMI narratives in the 2024 European elections’ campaign

Democratic elections are facing an unprecedented challenge from the increasingly widespread false and misleading narratives, or conspiracy theories. It has been increasingly recognized, in Europe and beyond, that foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) campaigns pose a significant danger to electoral integrity, with foreign actors seeking to manipulate public opinion, influence voter behaviour, undermine trust in electoral processes, and de-legitimize the very foundations of the democratic governance models, while exploiting locally salient social and political cleavages, in order to polarise the electorate. Massively growing accessibility to and sinking costs of generative artificial intelligence further increased concerns about FIMI-driven distortion of democratic processes. This paper examines one of the key present-day challenges to European democracy, namely the nature of the threat posed by FIMI to pan-European electoral processes. Taking the example of the 2024 European elections’ campaign, the paper sheds light on the types of Russian FIMI narratives, and their usages across EU member states. It advances our understanding of the structure, internal links and objectives of the FIMI narrative production across national contexts of five country cases: France, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Spain. Empirically, the analysis relies on mixed methods approach and thematic datasets developed from Exa.ai and refined with ChatGPT. The comparative analysis shows how Russian FIMI narratives, automatically and artificially disseminated across (social) media environments of selected EU member states during the 2024 European elections’ campaign, were both exhibiting content similarities and were at the same time strategically adapted to exploit and resonate with national contexts and audiences. It also shows the evolution of the scope and content of FIMI narratives disseminated in the context of the 2024 and 2019 European campaigns.