The European defense budget, amounting to eight hundred billion euros, has a digital gap. Analysis by Vanesa Valcheva, Balkan Free Media Initiative (BFMI)

This piece was first published in BeeMagazine, a leading platform for political and policy analysis across the continent. It is republished here to further amplify its message.

This week, members of the European Parliament approved the allocation of up to €800 billion for military capabilities through the Defence Readiness Omnibus. Faced with undeniable military threats, Brussels reintroduced five major civilian programs virtually overnight. The institutional agility is impressive. The political consensus is unprecedented. The message: Europe knows how to act when it decides to do so.

The contrast is stark. The Commission collected only €58 million in platform supervision fees for the implementation of the DSA in 2025. This is the total budget for staff salaries, technology specialists, and overheads for the supervision of the world's largest tech companies, less than the Defense Omnibus budget allocated solely for administrative simplification of authorization procedures. This is the enforcement capacity that defends the digital infrastructure of European democracy.

Meanwhile, in Bulgaria, 150,000 protesters have just overthrown the government. Generation Z mobilized via TikTok and Instagram to laser-project the words "Mafia Out" onto the parliament buildings. While a poorly managed budget provided the immediate spark, the deeper fuels were already there: seven elections in four years, endemic corruption, and Delyan Peevski, sanctioned by both the United States and the United Kingdom for that very corruption, who effectively shapes government policy from the shadows.

The platforms that enabled democratic mobilization are the same ones that fuel chronic information pollution. Between one election and the next, they normalize the oligarchic grip that makes protest inevitable.

The connective tissue between Bulgaria's institutional paralysis and the threats looming over Kosovo is infrastructural. Both crises exploit the same economics of commercial manipulation that our recent analysis at the Balkan Free Media Initiative with Sensika details, a market in which influence operations are sold as readily available services rather than state-sponsored cyberwarfare. Third-party providers monetize false engagement on an industrial scale. Bot networks sophisticated enough to use unique IP addresses remain affordable for modest budgets. Actors purchase from this catalog to target elections across the continent.

Kosovo is facing elections this year amid coordinated disinformation campaigns emanating from these very same providers. Germany and Poland will go to the polls in 2026, where these same tactics could gain traction. What Brussels recognizes as discrete national crises is actually a scalable threat architecture operating through regulatory gaps that Defense Omnibus-style resources could fill.

Institutional asymmetry is inevitable. The European Centre for Democratic Resilience, intended to be the operational hub for countering information manipulation, does not have a dedicated budget even remotely comparable to that of defense programs. We are defending the digital infrastructure of democracy with a fraction of what we spend to streamline military authorizations, even as that same infrastructure enables both the mobilization of protests and the manipulation of networks that make seven elections inevitable in four years.

The Defense Omnibus itself recognizes this gap. The legislation explicitly includes "strengthening the integrity of elections" in its security mandate, recognizing that threats are no longer purely military but hybrid. Yet, election infrastructure receives guidance documents, while artillery systems receive billions. Brussels has included algorithmic manipulation in its threat assessments, but excluded it from the budget.

The Democracy Shield, announced in von der Leyen 's July 2024 political guidelines, was finally unveiled in November 2025 after delays that members of the European Parliament publicly criticized. It offers around 50 action points, most of which are commitments to strengthen voluntary coordination or to prepare guidelines. The Democracy Shield's limitations may reflect competing priorities rather than indifference, but the gap between rhetoric and resources remains, and the contrast is instructive.

The Defense Omnibus went from idea to approval in eight months, specifying funding sources and fiscal flexibility parameters. The Democracy Shield took sixteen months to provide fifty vague action points. Defense gets deadlines, budgets, and results. Democracy gets direction and coordination.

Bulgaria's seven elections in four years reveal what happens when manipulation becomes economically self-sustaining without structural intervention. The elections in Kosovo will test whether candidate countries will receive the protection promised by Brussels through pre-accession conditionality mechanisms, particularly whether DSA enforcement capacity is developed before the manipulation infrastructure becomes entrenched. The 2026 elections in Germany and Poland will demonstrate whether member states fully covered by the DSA perform better with existing enforcement resources.

The common denominator is an enforcement framework that continues to function as if the digital infrastructure were a neutral plumbing system rather than a primary battlefield where democratic legitimacy is now decided.

What remains unclear is whether policymakers recognize that the infrastructures that enable both democratic mobilization and its systematic erosion deserve resources commensurate with this duality. Brussels has mobilized €800 billion for defense in eight months. While Europe strengthens its military capabilities, adversaries are exploiting what matters most: the gap between fortified borders and porous digital infrastructure.

No amount of tanks can address strategic vulnerabilities when the operating system of democracy remains defenseless.

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