Fair vs free elections

Earlier this month, I visited Armenia, and wrote a dispatch from a country fighting the most consequential election of it’s short historical life so far.

The results are in: Nikol Pashinyan, the sitting Prime Minister,  secured a parliamentary majority. After his victory, he announced that Armenia would pursue closer relations with the West without relinquishing its place in the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union. “The people of Armenia voted for peace, regional prosperity and regional cooperation, and I hope this will be met with a positive response from Turkey and Azerbaijan,” he added, referencing his primary political goal of a peace agreement with Azerbaijan and the normalisation of relations with Turkey.

Important sticking points remain. Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party secured a parliamentary majority, but lacks the supermajority needed to hold a referendum on constitutional changes — including the removal of references to Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan says amount to territorial claims, a crucial condition for concluding a final peace deal. 

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen welcomed his victory, saying: “We deeply value our partnership with a democratic Armenia that is drawing ever closer to Europe.” Armenia is unusual in the region for remaining a democracy. Yet concerns raised by observers over the conduct of the election reveal much about the increasingly realist approach Europe is adopting towards elections in countries seeking to turn west as Russia retreats from its former sphere of influence.

In the run-up to the elections, Armenian authorities arrested civil activists and opposition figures, including members of Strong Armenia, led by the Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, who won 25% of the seats in parliament. The allegations ranged from vote-buying and financial crimes to incitement to overthrow the government: a further six candidates from Karapetyan’s party were also arrested over the weekend before voting commenced, although the exact nature of the charges against them remained unclear.

The International Observatory of Democracy of Armenia has cited a series of what it describes as authoritarian actions in order to warn against “a deteriorating environment for political and civil rights in Armenia raises serious concerns” about the conditions for a free and fair election. Recent amendments to the Electoral Code have been criticised for effectively preventing opposition alliances from competing on equal terms, whilst Pashinyan has been recorded saying he would kill Robert Kocharyan and Samvel Karapetyan, two of his main political opponents, while campaigning during the general election. Following the election, Pashinyan said his party’s priority for the next term would be the complete dismantling of what he called a “criminal-oligarchic system”, adding that leading opposition figures should face criminal prosecution.

As might be expected with any election in the region, and particularly one fought on such lines as Armenia’s, there have been widespread reports of Russian election interference too. Threats from Moscow have been explicit with warnings of the resumption of tariffs on cheap Russian oil and gas exports, and before the election restricted Armenian exports of key agricultural products, flowers and the brandy and mineral waters of which Armenians are justly proud. Reuters reports that Russia has also utilised online disinformation campaigns: sources also spoke of evidence that Russia’s Directorate for Strategic Cooperation and Partnership had discussed transporting 100,000 Armenians in order to allow them to vote for anti-Pashinyan candidates. By mid-May, the Kremlin had set regional quotas for the number of Armenians to be dispatched and instructed administrators to report on their readiness and preparations. There are an estimated 2m Armenians in Russia, but Armenians are not allowed to vote in elections whilst abroad. 

The EU has largely dismissed criticism of Pashinyan, openly signalling support for Armenia’s pivot away from Moscow. On Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced €50m (£43m) in aid for Armenia, describing it as a response to what she called “Moscow weaponising economic relations for political pressure,” and said the EU would also ease trade restrictions with Yerevan on goods targeted by Russia.

Before the election, it also deployed a Hybrid Rapid Response Team following a request from Armenia’s Foreign Minister “to help counter the threats ahead of the country’s elections,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said. This followed the allocation of €12m in December to help counter Russian disinformation. “Supporting democratic resilience in our neighborhood remains essential. We will not leave Armenia to face foreign interference alone. Democracies under pressure can count on Europe,” she added. 

Lawyers to Karapetyan submitted a formal legal complaint to the European Commission, alleging that this group, providing advice to the Prime Minister amongst other agencies, constitutes direct interference in the country’s internal political processes. “In practice, such a mechanism enables Armenian authorities to characterise opposition activity as foreign interference, despite the EU having condemned such mechanisms elsewhere, namely in Russia and Georgia.”

As Sabine Fischer describes in her most recent book The Chauvinist Threat, former Soviet republics are weaker states are less capable of resisting Russia’s hybrid warfare than EU member states:

Moscow uses its secret services and close connections to Moldovan oligarchs to destabilize the pro-European president Maia Sandu and her government. Russia’s foreign media floods the country with anti-European and anti-liberal propaganda. The presence of Russian troops in separatist Transnistria could lead to war spilling into Moldova. In March 2023, investigative journalists found that the Kremlin had concrete plans to install a vassal government in Chişinău. This sense of vulnerability is even clearer in Georgia. Tbilisi kept its distance from its northern neighbour for a long time after the five-day war in 2008. But now many Georgians fear that Russia could regain its influence. Their country has been in deep internal political turmoil for over a year. Despite ongoing mass demonstrations, the Georgian parliament passed a law similar to the Russian one on ‘foreign agents’ in spring 2024. This poses an existential threat to civil society organizations and was heavily criticized by the EU.

The space between interference and countering threats is always blurred, and one that Europe is becoming increasingly confident to operate within as it seeks to support countries turning away from Russia.

Moldova’s two most recent elections — presidential in 2024 and parliamentary in 2025 — took place with a similar backdrop to those of Armenia’s, with intense public debate on how to balance between the EU and Russia. Since 2021, Moldova has elected leaders advocating closer alignment with the EU, culminating in the opening of accession negotiations in mid-2024. In late 2024, the pursuit of EU membership was formally embedded in the constitution following a closely contested referendum. International observers found these elections “took place against the backdrop of unprecedented hybrid attacks, including illegal funding and disinformation and cyberattacks amid deep political polarisation over the country’s geopolitical orientation.”

Since it’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia has targeted Moldova with a far greater scale and frequency of cyberattacks, widespread vote-buying, illicit campaign financing, disinformation campaigns, cyberattacks and other forms of interference — including a manufactured gas crisis in the separatist region of Transnistria.

The EU has been providing support to Moldova in response, including supporting efforts at better campaign finance oversight, focussing on third party campaigning, illicit financing and abuse of state resources, as well as countering online disinformation. However, as the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights noted, there were again problems: whilst it found Moldova’s election authorities professional, transparent, competent and efficient, “a number of decisions along partisan lines on certain controversial issues called into question their impartiality and independence.” This included regular changes to new laws around electoral financing — including during the campaign — and the de-registering of two parties just two days before election day.

Greater involvement in these elections is not just to counter the threat of Russian influence, but also to prevent a repeat of the Romanian election annulment of 2024. In an election which —again — saw a pro-EU candidate face off against an EU_skeptical right-wing populist, allegations of voter manipulation, foreign interference and attempts to undermine the democratic process prompted Romania’s Constitutional Court to annul the first round of the election and bar two candidates from standing.

The decision came after voting had already begun among the Romanian diaspora and was announced virtually overnight, with limited explanation and shortly after assurances the previous evening that the election would proceed as planned.

Much of this centered around the role of TikTok. Călin Georgescu, previously polling at around 5%, unexpectedly came first in the initial tally, amid questions over opaque campaign financing, the use of digital influencers, and TikTok’s recommendation system, which has around 9 million users in Romania. 

A declassified Romanian intelligence report, alleged Georgescu’s campaign had been aided by Russian actors: according to the report, the campaign’s social-media activity closely resembled the “Brother Next to Brother” influence pattern observed in Ukraine before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. His rapid rise from unknown to global TikTok phenomenon, despite reporting no campaign expenditure, further heightened suspicions. Conspiracy content and deepfakes contributed to a climate of confusion, while TikTok was criticised for failing to identify or label political material, to effectively disrupt coordinated disinformation and failed to disclose who sponsored political ads, how audiences were targeted, and where funding originated. This led the European Commission to launch an investigation into the platform’s handling of election-related risks under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Based on evidence provided by TikTok, a preliminary Republican-authored report by the US Congressional Judiciary Committee published earlier this year, entitled Europe’s Decade-Long Campaign to Censor the Global Internet, alleges that the European Commission sought to shape political discourse in EU member states during election periods. Drawing on evidence supplied by TikTok, the report concludes that it was the European Union — rather than Russia — that interfered in Romania’s elections. The annulment sparked widespread public anger and intensified political turbulence. Confidence in democratic institutions, predictably, deteriorated.

Russian electoral interference in it’s former sphere of influence is one of the most pressing questions facing Europe. But the problem is not simply Moscow-aligned politicians taking power: even when pro-EU candidates are returned, the methods required to limit Russian influence can in turn be portrayed as EU interference. Combined with the already deeply dividing nature of these elections, this creates a destabilising political climate of accusations and counter-accusations, of doubt and disillusionment, and a potentially profound erosion of trust in the relatively new and still fragile democratic institutions of these countries.

As The Journal of Democracy puts it: “This is a classic Kremlin strategy: If a target state’s public becomes convinced that democratic processes are inherently corrupt or illegitimate, then Russia has successfully weakened the very foundations of that democracy.” A Republican Party that sees EU attempts to control technology companies solely through the lens of free speech will be an unwelcome addition to the long shadows that cover this murky space. 

There is a distinction between free and fair elections: in the face of increasingly active Russian operations — which, thankfully, are as crude and unrefined as their oil — the EU looks like it is increasingly willing to make that distinction. Here, and perhaps only here, European realpolitik looks like it’s back.