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For this week’s European Focus, our colleague Alicia Allamilos interviewed a man who professionally follows Russian disinformation campaigns in Spain, and the wider Spanish-speaking world. For security reasons, our interviewee keeps his identity secret.

Last summer, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko ordered an elaborate operation that brought thousands of Middle-Eastern illegal immigrants to the Polish border. Could this happen again, but with the action shifting from Belarus to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad?

The Polish government considers this quite likely. According to the Ministry of Defence, there is intelligence information that Russia is preparing a “hybrid attack” on the Kaliningrad border. However, the Ministry did not make the details public. The alleged plan is for Russia to fly planes full of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East to Kaliningrad, and then push them across the border into Poland.

For this reason, the Polish military last Wednesday started to erect a 2.5-metre-high fence with triple razor-wire along the entire 200-kilometer border with Russia – similar to the fence that the Polish government built along 186 kilometers of its border with Belarus last year.

Whether this deterred further migrants, or Belarus froze their operations, is open to debate. As is the question of whether Russia wants to carry out such an operation in Kaliningrad.

Last year, the construction of the fence further polarized the deeply divided Polish society. While the state media strongly supported the action, opponents of the fence accused the government of a lack of humanity, as more than a dozen people died of exhaustion in the Belarusian forests because the Poles refused to let them in.

Now, part of the opposition and the media are already accusing the government of propaganda. Meanwhile, the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) needs to mobilize the electorate ahead of next year’s elections. The higher the turnout, the more certain the party’s victory. And a migrant crisis could help bring out more voters for PiS, who consider themselves supporters of the government.

Almost one in five Germans – 19% – believe that NATO provoked Russia’s war against Ukraine, according to a recent study. This is up from 12% in April.

As the study suggests, pro-Russian propaganda offers a distorted context, where the US is fundamentally denigrated and Russia is glorified. Anti-democratic actors such as the right-wing AfD party also spread disinformation to shake confidence in democracy, the authors conclude.

This works, given that an additional 21% partially believe that NATO is to blame for Russia’s war. What could be a practical outcome of such disinfo? One result: sceptics tend to be against sanctions.

Three men caught my eye in 2014 after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s annual summer speech on a sunny Transylvanian afternoon, in the spa town of Băile Tușnad (Tusványos). They were eager political pilgrims. I’ve seen a lot of strange things here, but this was really disturbing.

Orbán gives a State of the Nation address in Romania every year, targeted at the country’s 1.2 million Hungarian minority. More than 500,000 of these have dual citizenship and the right to vote in Hungarian elections. Over 90% of those voters support Orbán’s Fidesz party. Orbán’s annual litany is truly an election-decider.

The embarrassing detail was on their T-shirts: Orbán’s men wore Putin’s portrait.

Since then, the bigger picture has become clearer. The Hungarian-Russian political alliance has now blossomed. At the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine, this cooperation took on its own Transylvanian topicality.

This war is about minority rights – as the Hungarian voters in Transylvania are told on a daily basis by the Hungarian state media and meme factories. And Russia and Putin personally (as well as Orbán) are the real champions of these minority rights. Putin is giving the Russians back their territories.

Are Transylvania or Ukrainian Transcarpathia, also inhabited by the Hungarian minority, next? The propaganda offers no explicit promises but only floating, informal hopes.

The Romanian majority in the polls is more in favor of the Ukrainian cause. Hungarian revisionism scares them. The war between Russia and Ukraine has a Hungarian-Romanian shadow.

On a hot October evening last week here in Transylvania a Hungarian right-wing extremist announced that Hungarians must be prepared for the annexation of Transylvania, for the oppression of the Jews and the Roma, and one of the local journalists should be hanged.

Romanian reactions to this were swift and fierce. Even the Prime Minister condemned the call for murder.

The journalist who they demanded to be hanged was me. I don’t know what kind of T-shirt would protect people like me in this time of war.

According to the latest polls, only 1.3% of Estonian voters support the Green Party. A political party in Estonia needs a threshold of 5% to enter parliament, so it is unlikely that the Greens will be represented in parliament in the next elections in March 2023.

Many commentators attribute this low rating to the party’s lack of a comprehensive political program that includes issues other than those concerning the environment. This is backed up by another survey, which states that 71% of Estonians would like to lead a more environmentally friendly lifestyle, but financial restraints and current laws do not support such a change.

With such a self-image, it is surprising to see concern about the environment not translating into political support. Is it something the Green Party alone can fix or should Estonians take a hard look in the mirror?

A few months ago, as I was rummaging through old stacks of paper I had stored in my grandmother’s attic, I found a letter from 2007 that the assistant to then Chancellor Angela Merkel had written to me and my sister.

It was in response to an appeal for which we had collected 364 signatures in our high schools, asking Merkel not to put the interests of the German auto industry first, but to keep her promise and treat climate protection as a top priority.

Kind words were the response, informing us how strongly Merkel is committed to climate protection. Reading this answer, one could immediately feel how shallow these phrases were.

Today they seem to be even more superficial, as we are light years away from adequately protecting the climate. The crisis has worsened. This year’s October in Germany was 3.8 ° Celsius warmer than the average of any October since 1881.

I see the activists of today and remember how desperate I was fifteen years ago. I remember the sleepless nights thinking about what I could do to raise awareness. How I decided to organize a conference for my school about the threat of climate change, to at least do something.

And I remember resigning myself a little later because nothing was going to change anyway as a result of my desperate “activism”. That I was a lonely teenager who had no influence on political decisions.

For today’s young activists, it must feel even more like it’s too late and too little. For me, however, seeing their actions feels like a relief. Worrying about climate change is no longer an isolated perspective. Today’s fight for climate action is being waged collectively and is more powerful. It’s the fight of a generation that is willing to use more radical means to make its voice heard. That gives me a little hope. Even if the shallow phrases about not acting still sound much louder.

“We know that young people especially care about protecting the environment. We will take this on board. Because, as Roger Scruton, one of the great masters of European conservative thought, wrote: ‘ecology is the most vivid example of the alliance between those who have been here and those who will come after us’.” – Giorgia Meloni

In her first speech to Parliament as Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni seems to be aware that the climate change issue is unavoidable. But by invoking right-wing ideologues such as Roger Scruton, she manipulates this issue to propose anti-environmental measures. Her party has rejected the European Green Deal and called climate activists gretini (a combination of “Greta” – after Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg – and “cretini” – idiots).

Now that the far-right party Fratelli d’Italia is in charge of the government, Meloni is using right-wing “ecologism” to advocate the idea of “nature with man in it,” as she has said. This means that she defends the right of corporations to pollute the environment in the name of productivity.

Last autumn an environmental activist and two journalists were shooting a documentary on the deforestation of Romania’s forests, when they were attacked, beaten and threatened with death. Although there were dozens of attackers, the police were only able to arrest four. Some of them were employees of the National Forest Administration, who are paid by the state to protect forests.

This is just the tip of the iceberg that shows the reality that activists have to face. No wonder they are mostly doomed to fail. Support from Western Europe activists could be crucial in this respect, as in the case of the gold mining project “Rosia Montana Gold Corporation”. This billion-dollar foreign investment in Romania’s Apuseni mountains was stopped after almost twenty years of struggle, which included cooperation between Romanian and international activist groups.

Official statistics estimate that an average of 20 million cubic metres of timber are illegally logged every year in Romania. According to Greenpeace Romania, “local legislation fails to protect nature, even when legal action is taken.”

Some NGOs are trying to encourage the EU to protect forests. It would take many years for these policies to be effective, if they ever can be. There is no real political will to implement them.

Yet Romania is in a privileged situation. While Western European countries are trying to rewild some of their regions, Romania only needs to protect what is still there: over 500,000 hectares of virgin and old-growth forests, which is more than any other country in the European Union. Our biodiversity is unique. We need to educate the entire population if we want to prevent corruption and protect the forests, with the help of a strong civil society.

Where Romanian activists have neither enough knowledge nor tools, western colleagues could also help, with a strategy adjusted to the Romanian reality. The bridge that must be built between Westerners and Easterners rests on different foundations on opposite banks of the river, and needs a unique structure to bring the two sides together.

Juan López de Uralde left his post as director of Greenpeace Spain to found the country’s first Green Party in 2011 – but without success. Today, the Greens are divided among various coalitions.

European Focus: Let’s start with the problem. Will Spain be the first country in Europe to be affected by the worst aspects of climate change?

Juan López de Uralde: We’re probably the EU’s first, and most vulnerable victim of climate change. According to the Spanish Meteorology Agency, the temperature increase has already reached 1.2º C. This has implications for the spread of wildfires, the reduced availability of water, the widening of arid zones and much more. The problem is that passivity is taking its toll – as we have long warned.

European Focus: As a woman from Córdoba, I remember the 47ºC summers and some years of water rationing. The awareness of climate disaster is there in Spain. Yet there is no Green Party and no strong environmental activism, why?

de Uralde: We have tried without success. There are three main problems: Firstly, the lack of resources. Secondly, the Spanish electoral system, which punishes small parties. And thirdly, there is no strong social support for the Green cause as compared to other European countries. Awareness has grown, but the climate issue is not yet a decisive factor in voting decisions. That’s the main difference with Europe. Economic or employment problems count more.

European Focus: You were in jail after gatecrashing a Climate Change Conference (COP) in 2009 with a banner. Now we see young activists throwing soup at Van Goghs. Do Spanish activists have to be even more radical to be heard?

de Uralde: We went directly to those who were causing the problem. But I respect what these activists are doing: it’s a cry for help from the younger generation. In Spain there was also a factor that we have not mentioned so far: The biggest climate mobilizations were around COP25 (in Madrid), just before the Covid 19 pandemic. Some major parties are also beginning to take up the climate agenda, but it remains to be seen whether this is really the case. If not, activism will increase.

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