With dozens of national, regional and local elections scheduled across Europe in 2026, the messages reaching voters will increasingly be synthesized, machine-generated and unverified by anyone.
AI-generated faces, staged crises, and nostalgia built for engagement are now circulating on the block as standard campaign material. In some cases, foreign actors intervene in national elections and deploy artificial personas to guide voters.
The city of Brussels has tried to keep up by building the world's toughest digital rulebook, the Digital Services Act, to counter this threat. But as elections accelerate, lawmakers are learning that it's easier to write laws than manage algorithms. – AI-driven politics is spreading At a pace that is difficult to keep up with.
Deepfakes, Slop, and GenAI
Across European elections, generative AI, “AI slop” and deepfakes are stacking three layers of digital political influence.
Deepfakes – audio or video that has been manipulated to appear to be from a real person – A high-risk, low-volume threat that flares up briefly in the following locations: 2025 Irish presidential election.
AI slop They do the dirty work of industrially producing cheap, emotional composite images and videos that dramatize immigration, crime, and social decline. This content currently dominates the recommendation feed, especially on TikTok, and is primarily driven by monetized AI-only accounts rather than official campaigns.
In this ecosystem, generative AI (text, images, and music artificially created from basic prompts) acts as a multiplier, accelerating polarizing narratives faster than Europe’s regulatory mechanisms can respond.
The use of AI exists across the political spectrum. Still, far-right political language (words like identity, threat, and cultural siege) corresponds almost perfectly to what algorithms reward: repetitive and provocative content.
AI operations across blocks
There is already evidence of the impact of AI on elections. During the 2024 French national elections, researchers at the nonprofit AI Forensics broadly identified 60 political posts generated entirely by AI He is active on the official accounts of political parties throughout French politics, mainly on Instagram and Facebook.
As a result, social media feeds were filled with dystopian skylines, crumbling cities, and surreal migration scenes meant to feel rather than validate.
“Rather than convincing people what is fake or real, it is more about getting an emotional response: fear, scandal, shock,” AI Forensics researcher Natalia Stanusch told Euractiv.
In Germany, candidates largely avoided using generated AI in the 2025 federal election, but the TikTok supporter network embraced it. A comprehensive nationalist visual. Hungary is preparing for a high-stakes vote in 2026. fake profile An attractive young man continues to send pro-government messages to users.
Meanwhile, Moldova provided a preview of any foreign AI interference. Russia-related network developed synthetically TikTok “Grandma” A report published by Mediacritica, a Romanian journalism center that tracks disinformation, urged voters to support Kremlin-approved candidates.
transparency
A few years ago, the city of Brussels feared that deepfakes could overthrow the government overnight. That moment never came. What actually arrived was massive AI propaganda that was much more difficult to combat.
On paper, the EU is building a strong defense. The AI Act classifies political manipulation as a “high-risk” activity and mandates transparency and oversight by national authorities and a new European AI Agency. The Digital Services Act requires the largest platforms to mitigate election-related risks. Other EU plans and norms add rules on political advertising and online disinformation.
In reality, major platforms such as TikTok retain broad discretion in determining what counts as manipulation, giving them significant control over how the rules are enforced.
There is no reliable way to measure how much AI-generated content is circulating undetected or unreported, and enforcement remains the weakest link in the system.
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