Executive Summary Democracy in Europe is under growing pressure. Authoritarian regimes like Russia and the People’s Republic of China are conducting increasingly sophisticated foreign interference campaigns that blend information manipulation, cyb [...]
The EU must make information warfare a core defense priority. With high-level summits, new initiatives, and massive spending commitments dominating headlines, the EU appears poised for a collective Zeitenwende in defense. Its exact contours remain u [...]
Foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) is a growing threat to democracies worldwide, with social media platforms as prime battlegrounds. In Europe, domestic and foreign malign actors engage in information operations aimed at underm [...]
The EU has made progress in bolstering its approach to geopolitics in accordance with a world that is increasingly adversarial and hostile to the EU's founding principles, but Brussels must still "move the needle more decisively" on security, defens [...]
Americans vote in this year’s consequential presidential election in an environment marked by growing threats, including the weaponization of artificial intelligence, influence campaigns run by foreign authoritarian adversaries, and false election n [...]
Few national contexts offer a more disturbing picture of Russian malign foreign interference than Moldova’s. As the country readies for critical elections on October 20, it also faces a barrage of Russian hybrid attacks of remarkable scale and inten [...]
Executive Summary Combating foreign interference in democracies, once a fringe policy issue on both sides of the Atlantic, has become one of the key policy and societal challenges of our time. It was not long ago when this set of issues would be b [...]
Italy has long been a prime target for Russian interference efforts. From cultivating malign financial ties and relationships with political elites to executing covert information operations, Russia has consistently sought to increase its influence [...]
Bucking the precedent of long and arduous bargaining processes over the EU’s top institutional jobs, national leaders found consensus on nominees for the bloc’s three most prized positions unusually fast. Equally unusual will be the barrage of chall [...]
The impact of the European Parliament’s rightward shift will depend on the extent to which the far right can unify as well as on the willingness of the center to engage with parties to their right. The 2024 European parliamentary elections were long [...]
Often criticized for their lack of mettle in combatting foreign interference, European institutions have shown signs of increased combativeness in recent weeks. A whole bevy of cash-for-influence, election interference, and espionage cases have been [...]
The European Parliament elections in 2024 will shape the political direction of the EU over the next five years and, therefore, constitute a defining moment. In this series, GMF experts discuss the impact the elections will have on EU policy in key [...]
Almost half a century after its Carnation Revolution that led to the end of the country’s dictatorship, Portugal’s political landscape is once again marked by the remarkable rise of the far right. Last Sunday’s election saw the ruling left-leaning S [...]
This year’s US presidential primaries will determine who will lead the country come January 2025 amid growing autocratic threats to American democracy. Experts from the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund are monitoring and a [...]
Poland’s recent election results mark a likely return of liberal democratic norms in the country and more constructive cooperation with the EU, however, not without challenges along the way, write Vassilis Ntousas and Krystyna Sikora. [...]
In her last State of the European Union (SOTEU) speech for this Commission mandate, Ursula von der Leyen expectedly stayed mum on whether she intends to stand again. But it is difficult to take her address as anything but a carefully calibrated effo [...]
It takes two to tango, and the Spanish election offers a sharp lesson for conservatives across Europe on how partnering with the radical right can go badly wrong. Sunday’s general election in Spain was a turning point in Spanish politics — but in m [...]
Spanish voters dealt a blow to Spain’s far-right in the national elections on Sunday, July 23. Here, GMF experts provide insights into the implications for Spain and the takeaways for centrist political leaders throughout Europe who are watching clo [...]
It has been almost a month since Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his governing party and allies were given a new electoral mandate to enlarge even further their footprint on the country’s trajectory. As the dust is now settling after a ne [...]
The European Commission has cut the distance between words and actions in terms of turning the EU into a geopolitical actor. But time is short before much more to be done before it can reliably say it accomplished its mission, write Vassilis Ntousas [...]
In the end, it was not so close. Turkey’s most tightly contested election in a generation ended up giving the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a new mandate to extend his unbroken and unprecedented 20-year hold on power. This victory will [...]
Still reeling from the long-term effects of more than a decade of economic turmoil, most Greeks headed to the polls on 21 May expecting that this election would be far less fateful when compared to previous turbulent cycles during the crisis years, [...]
For a country long inured to hardship and crisis management, the upcoming election taking place in Greece on May 21st feels like a transition back to “normal”. Gone are the extraordinary conditions of supervision and oversight by the troika of inter [...]
Just as the Netanyahu government took its lessons from authoritarian playbooks the world over, so, too, will illiberal governments with anti-democratic aspirations take a page from Israel if the government’s attempted coup ultimately succeeds. For t [...]
Democracies across all continents are under immense pressure. In the past two decades, democratic backsliding has shifted from being a worrying yet peripheral factor to being a defining element of modern politics. The alarming signs, the exact mech [...]
At the start of the new year, we asked our experts to each put forth one recommendation that would strengthen democracy during a period of declining trust, emboldened autocrats, and war. Their answers touch on a variety of issues—from the war in Ukr [...]
Almost a month after an extremely consequential US midterm election, the initial collective sigh of relief felt by most Europeans seems to have given way to pause, if not revived concern. President Macron’s recent official state visit to Washington [...]
On 8 November 2022, two years after Joe Biden was elected president of the United States, Americans cast their ballots in a highly consequential midterm election. Although the final results may take days or weeks to be known, the vaunted ‘red wave’ [...]
Tomorrow’s midterm elections will be a benchmark for the state of American democracy. As early voting surges, people around the country (and the world) are watching to see what happens in what is perhaps the most important midterm election in recent [...]
Yesterday, the Biden administration released its National Security Strategy, which focuses on the competition between democracy and autocracy, lays out threats coming from Russia and China, and notes that the US must both strengthen democracy at hom [...]
On September 14, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen delivered her third State of the European Union speech. With European democratic values and institutions under immense pressure, both abroad and at home, the address conveyed [...]
This article was jointly published by the Istituto Affari Internazionali and the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Views expressed are the authors' alone. Introduction Should the polling prove accurate, Italy will soon be governed by its most radi [...]
ASD's Head of European Operations Vassilis Ntousas moderated a panel on democracy vs. autocracy as part of the Global Progressive Forum 2022. [...]