| |||
Mais enfin, "l'Europe" ne manipule pas l'information. La désinformation et les ingérences, c'est les autres ! |
European Diplomacy Seems too Ashamed to Look at What Happened in Romania
The new Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) 2026 report carefully avoided making Romania a case study.
|
| |||||||||||||||
I guess very few people were as enthusiastic as I was at the prospect of the release of a new FIMI report today. I don’t want to sound sadistic, but I was genuinely curious about what kind of fabrication they would use to justify what happened in Romania in 2024.
Good news: no European technocrats, no European experts risked their name by making up a story that doesn’t stand on its own feet.
Francezul is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Last year, when the last report was published, it was deemed too early to provide any information about what happened in Romania in November and December 2024, even though the report was published in March 2025.
The report is almost exclusively focused on Russian threats. Yet the biggest story ever — the annulment of an election supposedly because of some Russian meddling — was not covered. It already looked fishy at the time.
This time, if you search for Romania, you will find it mentioned eight times, but not in a way that points to any specific activities, let alone providing what should have been done: a full case study of the Romanian case. The obvious reason is that there is no case. A group of people canceled an election because they were not happy with the result, and then a coalition of actors with low moral standards whitewashed their decision into something dressed as a fight against Russian meddling.
You can find this year’s report here.
And you can find last year’s report here.
EEAS navigation
The European External Action Service (EEAS) is headed by Kaja Kallas, Vice-President of the European Commission, who personally repeatedly referred to alleged Russian meddling in Romania’s elections in public statements. On 18.12.2024: “As we recently saw in Romania, Moldova and Georgia, Russia does not stop its attempts to undermine and destabilise our Union and our partners.” Then on 22.01.2025: “Putin’s regime is already undertaking increasingly brazen acts of sabotage: cyber-attacks in Spain and Czechia; election interference in Romania and Moldova [..].
At the same time, her written foreword to the official EEAS 2024 FIMI report was clearly omitting Romania: “Our information space has become a geopolitical battleground. From the data gathered by the EEAS, last year over eighty countries and over two hundred organisations were the targets of attacks… From the Paris Olympic and Paralympic games, to the Presidential elections in Moldova, to the Sahel states of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso; from farmers’ protests in Germany to biased material legitimizing Russian economic and military influence in the Middle East, Africa, the U.S. and parts of Latin America, no sector of society was spared. […].”
Neverthless, Kallas’s spoken remarks in 2025, visibly based on the same foreword, was bringing back the “Russian meddling in Romania’s elections” narrative with an inflation in the number of attacks and targets worldwide: “Last year alone, more than ninety [sic] countries and over three hundred [sic] organisations were targets of attacks. From the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games to the presidential elections in Romania [sic] and Moldova.”
The 2025 report contained a critical technical note explaining that “data collection covered incidents up until early November 2024. FIMI activities related to the Romanian elections are not included in the sample.”
Avoiding to assess what would allegedly be the biggest and most successful attack by Russia against a member State may have been the safest decision for the report’s authors, considering the revelation by the media outlet Snoop that the main campaign supporting the outsider candidate Călin Georgescu, often framed as “pro-Russian” by the media, was actually a campaign paid by the incumbent PNL party.
We’re in 2026, it’s getting harder and harder to provide evidence of something that didn’t exist, as our colleague, Romania journalist Patrick de Hillerin, perfectly framed :
 |
|
Hybrid Regime Leprosy
The annulment, on flimsy grounds, led the Economist to categorize Romania as a hybrid regime in its 2025 Democracy Index, the first one like that in the EU.
It really feels like the lie they spun is crumbling. Romania’s current regime has the charm of leprosy.
And in a way, no matter the signaling made by European politicians, it is very reassuring that people within the European administration — those actually writing the reports — don’t want to get their hands dirty defending those who lied to stay in power and canceled democracy.
Francezul is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
| ||||||||||
© 2026 L'Eclaireur - Alpes
Directrice de la publication : Patricia Cerinsek
