This Tuesday 15 September, Members of the European Parliament adopted, by 420 votes to 220, their recommendations to strengthen “the European Democracy Shield”. Sophie Wilmès, Vice-President of the European Parliament and full member of the special EUDS committee, sees this as a way to better protect our societies and democratic processes, provided the tools of this strategy are fully implemented.
The “European Democracy Shield” is a strategy presented by the European Commission last November, aimed at tackling increasingly complex threats to our democracies, such as foreign interference, information manipulation and hybrid attacks seeking to influence elections or undermine citizens' trust in their institutions. The report put to the vote this Tuesday is the result of the work of the special parliamentary committee: “More than 1,600 amendments tabled, 66 exchanges of views, eleven public hearings, seven missions. These figures alone demonstrate the sustained parliamentary work carried out to build a coherent and effective European response to all the threats facing our democracies. We must approach this subject seriously, but also with a cool head, without giving in to panic or causing it. But it is clear that organisations and foreign powers are seeking to destabilise us and influence our democratic choices. For Belgians, as for Europeans, what is at stake is being able to keep deciding their own future, freely. We cannot underestimate what is already happening in Europe”, Sophie Wilmès stresses.
The most emblematic measure of the Shield is the European Centre for Democratic Resilience (ECDR), which began its work in February 2026. Its mission is to facilitate the sharing of information and expertise to better detect manipulation campaigns and coordinate support for national authorities in countering them. “If each country has to identify the same networks alone and build a response alone, we lose precious time”, the Vice-President insists. However, she specifies: “We don't want yet another gadget, which is why we want this Centre to be able to grow in capacity. We must give it a stable multidisciplinary team, lasting resources and a clear mandate. Without coordination, if each country has to detect the same threats alone and respond to them alone, we will not succeed. But for that, the Member States obviously have to play along. Overall, across the whole arsenal proposed by the Democracy Shield, we will be paying very close attention to the results.”
Sophie Wilmès is also pleased to find in the text several priorities she herself championed in committee. Europol will need to complement the ECDR's work. When an operation involves criminal networks active in several countries, the European agency can provide its expertise in criminal analysis and facilitate cooperation between investigators. Strengthening Europol's role in this area will also be a major issue in the revision of its mandate, on which Sophie Wilmès will work as shadow rapporteur.
The question of the involvement of foreign non-state actors in the European political landscape is also the subject of several recommendations.
The report also calls for a much more proactive approach to strengthening digital sovereignty and harnessing the potential of new technologies such as artificial intelligence. For Sophie Wilmès, our ability to protect our democracies also depends on the technologies that Europe masters. While artificial intelligence can create fake videos and coordinate hybrid attacks on a large scale, it can also help, for example, to quickly identify manipulated content and strengthen our security against cyberattacks. It is therefore essential to invest intelligently in these tools, within a strict ethical framework: AI at the service of humans, under human control.
The report also proposes better preparation for elections, notably through simulation exercises and stronger protection of electoral infrastructure. It also calls for faster responses from platforms to coordinated manipulation campaigns. “All this clearly echoes what happened this summer in Ceuta, or the disinformation campaigns targeting certain candidates in the French presidential election”, Sophie Wilmès recalls.
The Vice-President concludes: “Strategic autonomy is not just a narrative. Nor is it limited to our defence, our energy independence or supporting our industry. Strategic autonomy is, first and foremost, our ability to make our own democratic choices, in complete freedom.”