The early call for general elections on November 29 has reopened the debate about the vulnerability of European democracies to foreign interference. However, the strategy deployed by Kremlin-linked communications apparatus does not fit the classic pattern of a massive disinformation campaign built on producing fake news. A new report from the EK Strategic Communications Center, prepared by Sasha Starost and Egor Kuroptev, shows that the Russian intervention operates through the rapid appropriation and relaunch of authentic political controversies.
The parliamentary rejection of two housing decrees on October 1, the protests sparked by the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal — an 87-year-old woman —, the encampment at Puerta del Sol, the territorial tensions and the processing of the Catalan amnesty have provided fertile ground for foreign manipulation and information interference networks (FIMI, for short). The central hypothesis of these networks does not revolve around fabricating inaccessible facts, but rather around interconnecting real grievances to drive them toward a single conclusion: Spanish democracy is undergoing a structural crisis of governance, and the call to vote merely reflects a bid by Pedro Sánchez to preserve power.
From housing tension to the questioning of Ukraine
The handling of the housing crisis is a clear example to explain how narrative absorption operates. After the government measures were rejected with votes from the Partido Popular, Vox and Junts per Catalunya, various influence channels began framing the parliamentary decision as part of a broader institutional collapse. Sputnik Mundo described the legislative setback as the formal reason for the call for elections, inserting it into a continuing government paralysis. Meanwhile, an analysis by RT en Español published on October 7 argued that the centrality of the housing debate gave the government a “window of opportunity” to temporarily shift the migrant crisis in Ceuta and the corruption investigations off the media agenda.
Paralleling this, channels like Ucraniando suggested that the election call aims to capitalize on social discontent with the rise of conservative forces, while Pravda ES redistributed content from the portal La Bandera based on 40dB surveys, emphasizing that the sum of PP and Vox approached 50% of support in the face of left fragmentation.
“The handling of the housing crisis is a great example to explain how narrative absorption works”
From a European perspective, it is particularly interesting to observe the bridge these networks build between the deterioration of living standards in Spain and the Community’s foreign policy. At the start of October, Spanish-speaking channels such as El Informador Global or Nuevos Paradigmas broadly circulated a Sputnik interview with Enrique Refoyo, founder of the Donbas Solidarity Vostok organization. Refoyo, translator of the ideologue Aleksandr Dugin and head of El Espía del Telón, summarized in the interview the core pro-Russian message by asking whether European citizens should go to war with Russia to defend governments that impoverish them.
Along the same lines, the InfoDefense Español network, linked to the military blogger Yuri Podolyaka, accused liberal elites of wasting public resources on Ukraine, while Pravda ES presented the investment of between €1.6 and €2.0 billion in military satellite communications — linked to the European IRIS² program — as a loss of national sovereignty in favor of Brussels. Thus, the housing problem, set within an internal political debate, becomes an argument against the European consensus.
Ceuta and the sovereignist wing: the continuities of the network
Regarding the Ceuta crisis, the EK Strategic Communications Center report addresses the continuity between the actors who exploited the episode during the summer and those who participate in the electoral conversation ahead of November 29. The far-right organization Democracia Nacional incorporated the vote call into its messages against the Hispanidad celebrations in Madrid, accusing the main political leaders of complicity in demographic substitution, while platforms like Aquí la Voz de Europa —with the participation of Pedro Chaparro and Gonzalo Martín— linked the elections to the persistence of the Ceuta issue.
It is worth recalling, as the investigation confirms, that Democracia Nacional and the Falange Española de las JONS took part in September 2025 in the founding congress of the International Soberanist League “Paladins” held in Saint Petersburg. This formal linkage confirms the existence of points of contact and converging interests between these actors.
“Democracia Nacional and FE de las JONS participated in the founding congress of the International Soberanist League ‘Paladins’ held in Saint Petersburg”
Apart from that, the deliberate distortion of facts does not come solely from Russia or from Spain. The Italian channel Rokot Frastuono manipulated a parliamentary intervention by Pedro Sánchez regarding Ceuta disinformation. While the president distinguished between the internal origin of the protests — where intelligence found no foreign-state involvement — and its subsequent amplification by international networks, the Italian channel removed the nuance to mockingly claim that Moncloa accused Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu of having organized demonstrations in Madrid. The aim? Probably to undermine the credibility of public institutions by suggesting they manipulate external threats to evade responsibility.
The European dimension and the limits of influence
A single national event is digested in an asymmetric way by alternate media and FIMI channels in other European countries to tailor it to their respective audiences. Again in Italy, the portal L’Antidiplomatico presented the Spanish elections as a “referendum on who has the right to inhabit the cities,” interpreting the Puerta del Sol mobilizations as an amendment to the electoral path. Simultaneously, the channel Tutti i Fatti focused on the amnesty debate and on Carles Puigdemont, amplifying the Constitutional Court’s statements and the criticisms of Alberto Núñez Feijóo previously distributed by Sputnik Mundo.
From the EK Strategic perspective, it is important to avoid a double simplification. On one hand, it is methodologically incorrect to equate the identification of digital amplification networks with demonstrating an actual impact on voters’ behavior; the study does not measure the real reach of these narratives among the citizenry. On the other hand, they warn, it would be a mistake to consider any critical stance toward the national government as the result of manipulation orchestrated from abroad.
“It is methodologically incorrect to confuse the identification of digital amplification networks with the demonstration of an actual impact on electoral behavior”
The main vulnerability of representative democracies does not stem from the Kremlin’s ability to impose false narratives on the public sphere. It lies in unresolved social tensions and in intense political polarization, elements that allow external actors to use the material problems of citizens as raw material to erode trust in democratic institutions and weaken European cohesion.
