Marine Le Pen may have lost, but the Kremlin is winning

MOSCOW — The Kremlin has, for years now, been a destabilizing force in the EU. Should the bloc dissolve tomorrow, it’s not hard to imagine Russian politicians taking to the streets to pop champagne.

As such, far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen’s defeat in the French presidential election has been painted as a defeat for Russian President Vladimir Putin as well. Her party, after all, took out loans from a Moscow-based bank and promised a softer line on Russia, advocating for the West to drop economic sanctions on Moscow.

The truth, however, is more complicated. Even with sanctions in place, the EU remains the country’s biggest trading partner. Putin has attempted to pivot toward China, but he is not in a position to negotiate favorable deals with Beijing. The Russia-China relationship is asymmetrical, and Russia doesn’t come out on top. Profound instability in the EU would put Putin in a precarious position as Russia’s already fragile economy continued to crumble.

Russian President Vladimir Putin | Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images

So why does the Kremlin support candidates who threaten to blow up the Continent? Its meddling is largely a PR move, a way to tell Europe “don’t mess with us” without causing any actual damage.

Russian support for Donald Trump during the U.S. presidential election last year followed the same pattern, as Mark Galeotti, a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague, has argued. Putin blamed Hillary Clinton personally for massive pro-democracy protests in Russia 2011-2012 when she was U.S. Secretary of State. But he fully expected her to win.

The Kremlin wanted to troll the American establishment. It hadn’t planned on an inexperienced and impulsive man moving into the White House. As investigations into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia pick up steam, Moscow can’t consider itself a winner. It’s more like a child whose pranks got out of hand.

Russia’s support for Le Pen is part of the same game. But it also served a distinct purpose: fodder for the domestic propaganda machine. Putin is less worried about how the West perceives him than he is about shoring up legitimacy at home.

Though he enjoys high approval ratings, Putin is facing mass protests and an increasingly vocal opposition. And with the bust of the oil boom, he’s not going to be able to buy support as he has in the past.

One tried and true tactic for dealing with an unsatisfied electorate is to make the case that they have nothing to complain about — that conditions are even more dire abroad.

That’s where Le Pen comes in. The far-right accentuates Europe’s instability and magnifies its flaws, helping Putin paint a picture of a Continent overrun with migrants, globalists and all sorts of other terrifying dangers. Deprived of an official ideology after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has come to define itself in terms of what it is not. And the dominant narrative on state television is that Russians “are not like those Europeans.”

According to Russian TV, the Continent is too soft, too tolerant. Its countries have sacrificed distinct cultural identities to a mindless, craven, corrupt union. It’s a vision of Europe that lines up perfectly with Le Pen’s.

The majority of Russians who rely on state television as their source of news have been convinced that they are better off under Putin

And it works. The majority of Russians who rely on state television as their source of news have been convinced that they are better off under Putin. Europe hurtles from one disaster to the next. Russia is “stable” — and never mind that more and more Russians are sliding into poverty.

The EU has few good options for preventing Putin from using its problems to shore himself up at home. But there’s one thing it can do: Stop playing up him up as a Bond villain capable of singlehandedly destabilizing the Continent. Doing so only plays into his hands — and provides the EU’s politicians with a convenient excuse for not addressing its problems.

Putin is opportunistic. He doesn’t create Europe’s problems. He just seeks to capitalize on them. The EU’s many ills — from austerity to terrorism — are grown locally, and they need to be addressed locally. It’s time to stop pointing the finger at the strongman in the east.

Natalia Antonova is a writer, journalist and co-founder of the Anti-Nihilist Institute.