In France, the Russophile extreme right has just scored a concussive victory in elections for the European Parliament. In Germany, an even more Russophile extreme right got more votes than Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s own party.
European elections are mainly referendums on each country’s governments. Seen that way, Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron are political roadkill.
Neither one’s party managed to win even 15 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election. In a fight for their political lives, neither can credibly lead the continent to rearm and confront the Russian threat, though each has described the stakes of doing so in existential terms.
The man in the Kremlin’s smirk has broadened into a grin.
Last week, Macron was trying to muster a coalition of European allies to send military trainers into Ukraine — NATO boots on the ground for the first time since Putin’s full-scale invasion. This week, Macron is trying, so far without success, to muster a moderate alliance to save his own political neck.
Having dissolved the National Assembly and called snap elections in the next month — at a stroke risking his government, his legacy, and France’s role in Europe and the world — Macron was reduced this week to quelling rumors that he plans to resign.
Meanwhile, French stocks and bonds were tanking on investors’ fears that the ethnocentrist hard-right party of Marine Le Pen, having coasted to victory in France’s elections for the European Parliament, might actually seize the reins of government in France this summer. That was all but unimaginable before Sunday.
Putin’s delight is uncontainable.
Scholz, an inept politician who has flailed in office and failed to manage a dysfunctional three-party governing coalition, wields no more authority in Berlin than a bratwurst.
This week, the Financial Times reported that Germany’s stock market chief said foreign investors are deriding the government in Berlin as “stupid” and warned that Scholz’s bickering coalition risked reducing the world’s No. 3 economy to the status of a “developing country.”
That warning reflected the broader failure of European economies to remain competitive. Sapped by a spike in energy prices triggered by the war in Ukraine, as well as their own zeal for overregulation, they have failed to keep pace with growth rates in the United States or China.
Putin, determined above all to be a protagonist on the world stage, is not standing idly by. His divisions of cyber-trolls are carpet-bombing Europeans with disinformation, deepfakes and deceptions.
But Moscow’s attacks now go beyond that: Its assaults on Washington’s European allies are increasingly kinetic, in Pentagon parlance. That means bombings and sabotage planned by Russian military intelligence, known as the GRU, according to Western officials.
In the latest incident, a 26-year-old man who had reportedly served in the Russian army was arrested near Paris after he injured himself in a hotel room with an explosive device. French authorities, who said the device was intended for use in a violent attack, put the man in the custody of France’s domestic intelligence agency, not the police. The incident took place the day before President Biden arrived in Paris to attend celebrations for D-Day’s 80th anniversary.
The GRU’s goal is to intimidate, disorient and distract a Western alliance already grappling with domestic divisions and disintegrating political consensus across its borders. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned of a Kremlin campaign that he said involved not just cyberattacks but “setting fire and sabotaging supply warehouses” and “disregarding sea borders and demarcations in the Baltics.”
About one-third of the of the countries in the 27-member European Union are now led by governments controlled or shared by extreme-right parties. Not all are friendly to the Kremlin, but some are. Not all would be content to see Ukraine abandoned by the West and parceled out in pieces to Russia, but some would be.
Meanwhile, the battlefield momentum Moscow enjoyed briefly in Ukraine — thanks largely to the Republican-led House of Representatives’ delay in approving a new arms package for Kyiv — has stalled. But to Putin that is of secondary importance. What he cares about is sustaining the violence, turbocharging Russia’s overheating economy increasingly dependent on military spending and biding his time until a second Trump presidency. And then: Oops, there goes any prospect of further U.S. aid, along with, sooner or later, Kyiv’s capacity to repel Moscow’s meat-grinder assaults.
That sound you hear is Putin chortling.