The Iceberg That Can Sink Europe
About a Foreign Influence Concept Destroying Democracy
(version française | versiune în limba română)
On March 7, 2024, Ursula von der Leyen took the stage in Bucharest before the EPP congress. After talking about the Russian threat, she added:
“And at home, Putin’s friends are trying to rewrite our history and hijack our future. They are spreading hate from behind their keyboards. And let there be no doubt what’s at stake in this election. Our peaceful and united Europe is being challenged like never before by populists, nationalists, and demagogues. Whether it is the far right or the far left. Whether it is the AfD, the Rassemblement National, the confederatia or Wasraschdene. The names may be different, but the goal is the same: They want to trample on our values, and they want to destroy our Europe. But we, the EPP, will never let that happen. So this is a defining moment. The signal of Bucharest today is — that EPP is standing for Europe, strong and secure, peaceful and prosperous, democratic and united. We stand pro EU, pro Ukraine, pro rule of law in the spirit of de Gasperi and Adenauer, of Vaclav Havel and Lech Wałęsa.”
It was a partisan speech, delivered at a party congress, by a candidate seeking re-election — a speech delivered during a few days of March that were crucial to the catastrophic evolution of Romania during the year that followed (see the timeline I compiled from March 2024 to December 2025 about the Judicial Coup in Romania). That context matters. But let’s focus on the most sinister part implied in this speech.
The European External Action Service’s 3rd Report on Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats, published in March 2025, offers a visual concept — the FIMI iceberg — and its four blocks of architecture. Above the waterline: official state channels (government accounts, MFA representatives) and state-controlled outlets (RT, Sputnik, CGTN). Below: state-linked channels operating under hidden state oversight, and at the very bottom, state-aligned channels — entities that “cannot be directly attributed to state control or funding” but “show systematic signs of alignment with a state entity.”
It starts as an elegant metaphor. The problem is what happens when we leave to the analyst the decision to determine how speech that is not foreign can be framed as foreign influence without proof — and, from there, how politicians holding power can use that framing to gain more power, by throwing part of the legitimate opposition — local, not foreign — into the category of what is considered foreign influence.
This is not a theoretical risk. It has already happened, it is happening again, and the EU establishment seems dedicated to remaining blind to the fact that this iceberg cuts both ways.
Here is how a concept meant to protect democracy can be used to sink it.
Our Own Foreign Influence: The FIMI Framework’s Blind Spot
There is a structural blind spot at the heart of the FIMI concept that its architects have never addressed, and almost certainly never intended to address: the framework was designed to identify threats arriving from outside the liberal democratic club. It has no category for malign foreign influence exercised by one EU member state against another — even when that influence fits the iceberg architecture perfectly, layer by layer.
France in Romania
Read France’s involvement in Romania’s 2024-2025 electoral crisis through the Exposure Matrix and the diagram fills itself in : “Macron’s France — Accomplice of the Romanian Hybrid Regime”.
At the top, Official State Channels: Macron conditioning French military deployment in Romania on the election result, in a December 2024 call to a presidential candidate — hours before the Constitutional Court annulled the vote. His May 2025 repeat, two days before the runoff. The French ambassador visiting the Romanian Constitutional Court on 5 March 2025, days before it blocked Georgescu’s candidacy. VIGINUM — operating under the Prime Minister’s office — publishing a report on Romania’s elections the same day as a French-Romanian ministerial meeting, acknowledging the campaign sponsor “remains unknown” while omitting the finding that it was funded by Romania’s own ruling party. A laundering operation with institutional letterhead.
Below, State-Controlled Outlets: Radio France Internationale, whose Romanian service amplified the Russian interference narrative with the French ambassador as a willing guest — delivering two demonstrable falsehoods on air, unchallenged. Read: “French Tango in Bucharest.”
And at the bottom, the grey zone the FIMI framework was built to illuminate: dozens of Romanian media outlets that relayed the French narrative with no traceable financial link to Paris. Were they part of France’s influence architecture? By the EEAS’s own criteria — systematic alignment, coordinated messaging, historical consistency — they fit the state-aligned category perfectly. The framework simply wasn’t designed to ask the question. Read: “The misery of the Romanian legacy media.”
Poland in Hungary
Apply the same matrix to the 2026 Hungarian elections and the pattern reproduces. VSquare, an investigative outlet operating within the OCCRP network, reported “GRU-linked election fixers” in Budapest, citing unnamed “European national security sources.” VSquare and its parent network have drawn roughly half or more of their budget from U.S. government sources, including USAID and NED, alongside European Commission funding. Polish Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minsiter Radosław Sikorski amplified the claims directly. The Washington Post followed with an alleged Russian assassination plot against Orbán, sourced to an intelligence document no one could verify. Polish Prime Minister Tusk took up the thread immediately.
VSquare’s narratives are also systematically amplified by Mr Sikorski’s, Anne Applebaum — nine-year NED board member, well known for her infamous article in Slate arguying that Palestinian media outlets were “legitimate targets.”
As journalist Michael Shellenberger has documented, OCCRP and USAID contributed to the construction of the Russiagate narrative, sustaining it long after the Mueller report could not. The infrastructure is the same. The sourcing standards are the same: anonymous, unverifiable, politically amplified, consequences-free.
What the FIMI framework calls “state-aligned channels” when the content can be framed as serving Moscow is simply called “investigative journalism” when the content serves Warsaw, Paris or Brussels. The iceberg could work in both directions. The EEAS chooses to see only the convenient half.
Romania as Proof of Concept
Romania is where the mechanism can be observed in clinical detail — and where two consecutive FIMI reports conspicuously failed to look (read: ”European Diplomacy Seems too Ashamed to Look at What Happened in Romania”). As I document extensively in the report on European Union interference in member states’ elections published by MCC Brussels, Romania is the perfect example of how the FIMI iceberg concept has been weaponised — with the complicity of France, the European Commission, a fake local civil society embedded in the censorship architecture, and the local “system.” The timeline I compiled while preparing that report tells the story with precision: the FIMI hysteria builds, enables censorship, then quietly deflates once the electoral risk has passed — without anyone ever producing the proof that the entire year of propagandisation supposedly required.
“The dogs that didn’t bark” complete the picture: we saw how the leading fact-checker left unverified claims about opposition candidates unchallenged, while targeting them with biased fact-checks or, when wearing its hat as a flagger within the Rapid Response System during elections, with flagging justifications as blunt as “propaganda for Călin Georgescu” (see “Zuckerberg’s Funky Romanian Consent Factory”, ”Funky Little Liars” and ”Flagging reason: propaganda for Călin Georgescu”). Claims that sovereigntist candidates were “pro-Russian assets,” colluding with foreign powers, or smeared through racially charged insinuations about Roma origins circulated freely and went entirely unchecked.
What threatened institutional authority was flagged. What delegitimised inconvenient candidates was tolerated.
The confession came from the winner. In a post-election interview on 19 May 2025, Nicușor Dan acknowledged that his rival Simion “likely wouldn’t have had Romania exiting the EU.” The existential threat had been manufactured. A population with 87,5% support for EU and NATO membership was told its civilisational anchors were at stake — and mobilised accordingly. Romania’s democratic consensus was weaponised against its own democratic process.
A Dangerous Game
The real problem with the technocrat and leading EU politicians using the FIMI iceberg is that foreign influence is whatever they please. We are veering into red-scare territory — fifth-column paranoia deployed in the service of incumbents who need an enemy to justify staying in power. The Russia-shouting has become a Groundhog Day with no exit. Romanian President Nicușor Dan recently blamed vaccine scepticism on Russia — a striking move for a man criticized in 2021 for not getting his shot fast enough.
In France, any dissent, any discontent, any unrest is regularly framed as Russian instrumentalisation.
This is not merely intellectually dishonest. It is an extremely dangerous game. If people fail persistently to call out the hypocrisy of power, some will eventually conclude that Russia is the natural ally of the people against the technocracy — and Mr Putin will collect political gain without having lifted a finger. The accusation manufactures the alignment it claims to expose.
The saner position is straightforward: if discontent comes from within our societies, if it is not attributed to Russia by actual links and an actual smoking gun, then it deserves the attention and respect owed to any participant in the democratic debate. Those who shout “Russia” - at people with no demonstrable connection to Russia - are threatening democracy.