An illiberal, radical Europe, ready to reduce democracy to electoralism, situated somewhere halfway between authoritarianism and democracy, is convenient for both the new administration in Washington, led by the trio of Trump – Vance – Musk, and for Vladimir Putin’s Moscow.
However, the stakes are different. While Russia aims to weaken the unity of the European Union and polarize it, even throwing it into chaos by fueling the extremes and corrupting the moderate political space, the new policy of the United States seems to be one of ideological export, promoting harsh conservatism and limiting society’s democratic participation in the electoral moment.
After the vote, as Donald Trump recently quoted from Napoleon, political power transcends good and evil, and the issue of compliance with the law no longer arises.
JD Vance and the ideological declaration of war
This was one of the stakes of the speech at Munich by American Vice President JD Vance, and that's why the Romanian case was used as a pretext.
What the American official conveyed is a new paradigm of power that America would like to export to Europe, a kind of overturning of the old democratization paradigm and the advancement of the soft autocratization model, of illiberalism where citizens only have a political body at the moment of voting, and the power regime is situated in a register that is both eschatological and business-oriented, taking on the structure and objectives of a religion.
What JD Vance said, using the Romanian case of the annulment of the presidential election, is that the democracy he wants to see established in Europe is one limited to the freely expressed vote, regardless of the rest of the electoral process – how the vote was influenced and crystallized no longer matters, nor how it is then translated into political programs.
As Peter Pomerantsev mentioned in one of the interviews for spotmedia.ro, Viktor Orban's model is viewed with sympathy in Washington, but JD Vance takes it to a higher level, the ideological one.
Unlike Donald Trump, whose political philosophy is opportunistic, JD Vance has real radical conservative convictions and an avowed ambition as an ideologue. Apart from extending a hand to the German far-right, the American Vice President aims to provoke a change in the dominant ideology in Europe, which remains liberalism.
The Degradation of Women, an Ingredient of Authoritarianism
Moscow also seeks the same, working for years on degrading the Western democracy model, including in the United States.
In Germany and Austria, for example, Russia fueled both extremes with competing narratives, narrowing the space of liberalism and moderate politicians as much as possible, hyperbolizing both progressivism and the radical conservative counter-reaction.
In the United States, there are already analyses on how the Kremlin amplified polarization around the Women's March in 2017, to the point where narratives circulated misogyny used as the main weapon of disinformation.
Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen connects the dots on how misogyny is one of the essential ingredients of Putinist authoritarianism within Russia, and a weapon of war and propaganda in Ukraine and the Western world.
Vladimir Putin was created by political technologist Pavlovski following the model of Max Otto von Stierlitz, popular in Russia, a Russian secret agent infiltrated in Hitler's foreign intelligence services - the Russian James Bond, essentially.
The story of Stierlitz was disseminated with the help of the KGB deep into the layers of Russia through a TV series. More recently, Putin even appeared in a documentary portraying Stierlitz, dressed in a Nazi uniform.
Russian propaganda amplified misogyny in the West, presenting feminism and related currents as threats to cultural identity.
In Russia, Ukrainian activists who protested at Maidan were portrayed in a film, The Maidan Furies, as non-women, prostitutes, or mentally ill, fallen from their socio-cultural role, thus also undermining the social role of men.
The Women's March in 2017 in the US was specifically targeted by Russian propaganda to undermine solidarity - analyses have been conducted on the content pushed by Russia on social media, portraying those women as mentally ill and/or terrorists.
Portraying diversity policies as the witch responsible for all evils, as done by ultra-conservative political platforms, is also the result of these narratives that exploit people's fears and make them behave as if the identity citadel is under siege, a strategy also used by Donald Trump's team.
A warning signal comes from Financial Times, which writes on Monday that the Trump Administration pressured the Romanian authorities to lift travel restrictions on influencer Andrew Tate, a supporter of the US President facing criminal charges in Bucharest - human trafficking and sexual abuse. The latter is perceived as falling under the impunity narrative of power in Russia.
The Bridgeheads from Bucharest
If illiberal and populist leaders around the world tried to capitalize on Donald Trump's victory and present themselves as empowered to impose a new dominant ideology at home, in fact, a paradigm of soft autocratic power, in Bucharest, the anti-EU campaign has taken on increasingly aggressive tones, in a language that surpasses even the intensity of lynching, from "march, me" in prime time to lists of enemies who must be silenced after an illiberal regime, a compromised democracy, would be installed in Bucharest.
The central message is that the European Union is in dissolution, defeated, unable to make decisions in the absence of the US. Old anti-vaccine and anti-Ukrainian narratives have been brought back, self-proclaimed sovereignist but actually isolationist and provocative.
The aggressiveness, sharp language, insults, threats aim to infest the public space, induce a state of fear in the face of imminent violence. Former presidential candidate, isolationist Călin Georgescu, in fact, directly threatened on Sunday evening to call on his followers to protest.
In the campaigns in the US and other European states, the Kremlin's ultimate goal was to shift polarization, violence, and chaos from online to offline, to the streets, so that chaos seems to be the norm.
Difficult days are also ahead in Bucharest, and authorities must be vigilant, given that institutions are infested with people with Moscow in their hearts.