No foreign power interfered more blatantly in Poland’s presidential elections than the EU.

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The election of Karol Nawrocki as Poland’s new president this week was bound to cause upset throughout the media and political classes. Predictably, there came the cries of “foreign interference”, because the right-wing populist candidate won.

According to Brussels-based American journalist Dave Keating, it was U.S. president Donald Trump who helped Nawrocki to victory, as part of America’s plan for “regime change in Europe.” His basis for this is the fact that Trump had openly backed Nawrocki.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem endorsed Nawrocki’s campaign on behalf of the Trump administration at CPAC Poland. Keating points out that it was previously “unheard of for a sitting cabinet member in the U.S. government to campaign for an opposition figure in a supposedly allied government.” But if Washington’s involvement raised eyebrows, it was nothing compared with the arguably more insidious tampering coming from much closer to home.

Of course, the U.S. is by no means the only foreign power with an interest in Poland’s new president. In the run-up to the elections, it was revealed that European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen had made her own interference by trying to protect the electoral chances of Nawrocki’s pro-Brussels rival, Rafał Trzaskowski—who was naturally the favoured candidate of Polish prime minister Donald Tusk. She reportedly delayed announcing several key EU decisions—including new climate targets, trade talks with Ukraine and the EU-Mercosur trade agreement—because she knew they would be particularly sensitive in Poland. She also chose to not publicly challenge Tusk’s opposition to the EU’s binding Pact on Migration and Asylum, in the hopes that he would fall into line after the elections.

The EU has hardly been shy about meddling in the elections of its member states. Earlier this year, former EU commissioner Thierry Breton openly admitted on French television that Brussels was largely to blame for cancelling Romania’s presidential elections last December. The Romanian Supreme Court prevented the second round of voting, ostensibly due to fears that the leading candidate—the radical right-wing, Eurosceptic Călin Georgescu—had been compromised by Russian involvement. The election was stalled and Georgescu was banned from participating, according to Breton, on the say-so of the EU. As if this stunning admission wasn’t bad enough, Breton went on to boast that “we did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary.”

Breton was making a clear reference to the meteoric rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany. At the time of his comments, the German federal elections were just a month away—and the right-populist AfD was polling in second place. Following February’s elections, the AfD remained the second largest party, and was locked out of power by a thoroughly anti-democratic ‘firewall’ in any case. But presumably, had the party pulled ahead in the polls before the election, Europe’s elites would not have hesitated in halting the elections or making moves to prevent the AfD from taking part in them. As it stands, the German state seems forever on the brink of banning the party altogether.

In a similar display of strangling inconvenient opposition, the EU served Rassemblement National (RN) parliamentary leader, Marine Le Pen, a whopping €3.5million fine in April. This came in the aftermath of her trial before a French court earlier this year, which found her guilty of misusing European Parliament money to fund her party’s domestic work. The sentence itself was of course politically motivated—the practice is illegal, obviously, but is by all accounts par for the course for many other parties in Brussels. The aim of the conviction was to rather ban Le Pen from standing in France’s next presidential elections in 2027. The EU then sought to cripple RN further, by demanding that the already financially fragile party cough up more money on top of the roughly €1million it had already paid in legal fees and compensation.

In Hungary, one of the biggest thorns in the EU’s side, Brussels has also made moves to influence the democratic process. German MEP Manfred Weber, leader of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) group in the European Parliament, has made it very clear that the European establishment is banking on the Hungarian opposition to unseat current prime minister Viktor Orbán in the coming 2026 elections. In a plenary speech in Strasbourg in October 2024, Weber confidently declared that, “as Tusk managed to defeat Kaczyński” in the 2023 Polish parliamentary elections, “so will Péter Magyar defeat Viktor Orbán; Péter Magyar is the future.”

And if Magyar doesn’t manage to defeat Orbán in 2026? Brussels may well double down. During Hungary’s elections in 2022, the EU was roundly accused of trying to sway the outcome by indirect means — particularly via the lavish funding of NGOs, media platforms, and activist networks hostile to the Fidesz government. The Hungarian Conservative reported at the time that groups like Action for Democracy poured resources into Hungary in a failed effort to engineer regime change. Despite all this, Orbán ultimately won.

This kind of strategy has become institutionalised through mechanisms like the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the so-called European Democracy Shield — both of which are framed as tools to defend democracy, but in practice allow Brussels to police speech, marginalise dissenting media, and justify selective pressure on governments that resist its agenda. The goal is no longer just to support opposition parties, but to reshape the entire political playing field to ensure they win.

This kind of interference is playing out across the continent. A report from MCC Brussels earlier this year, titled The EU’s Propaganda Machine: How the EU funds NGOs to promote itself, revealed just how pernicious the EU’s attempts to control the political narrative really are. The European Commission has been quietly funding an ecosystem of non-governmental organisations and think-tanks across the bloc to promote its own ideological agenda—often using taxpayer money to do so. These organisations aggressively push pro-Brussels narratives while undermining conservative, populist and Eurosceptic parties in its member states. Initiatives like the RevivEU project, which aims to “combat Eurosceptic narrative promoted by autocratic elites” across Europe, and direct subsidies to federalist youth movements like the Young European Federalists are just a handful of examples cited in the chilling report.

This all fits a familiar pattern—if you can’t beat the populists, ban them. Or at the very least, make it nearly impossible for them to continue existing. Whether it is Breton musing about which European elections to sabotage next or Brussels pumping money into propagandising NGOs, the message from Europe’s ruling class is very clear: some political beliefs are more acceptable than others. And wherever the ‘wrong’ candidate even comes close to winning an election, the EU has no qualms about overriding democracy to reinforce its ideological hegemony.

This is precisely why it is so absurd to feign outrage over American involvement in Poland’s elections. Of course, the Polish people alone should be left to decide who they want to govern them. But the EU has spent years trying to reshape the entire continent’s political future to its own liking. If foreign meddling is the concern, Brussels is by far the worst offender.

Original article: The European Conservative