This made me reflect on multiple interesting ideas.

This has been a case of hidden-intended foreign interference, where foreign interests have supported a candidate without making it openly. Even patriotic people should feel against this… unless may be they have already voted for it, humans are like that.

An interesting alternative would have been that, for example, Elon Musk (which may still be popular among some people) decide from the beginning to openly support such candidate, trying to influence positively the candidate’s success with all his resources. Being an European country, this would be also foreign interference. You may see where this reflections are going…

Lastly, imagine a similar situation to the previous one but with a national powerful lobby. Is not foreign interference, but is the same kind of action in the end, a particular interest investing in a political candidate. This happens everywhere, and has proved to be very successful for them, with grey lines drawn mostly on direct money donations in some countries, which nowadays is a bit of a scarce control anyway.

Now, I find hard to believe that some candidate would be able to convince you that, despite benefit of being openly supported by a particular group of interest, will not represent it but the promises you want to hear once the interference is openly public… yet, considering all the media control those groups of interest invest on, I think we already are in a situation were all candidates of success in democracies around the world have strong conflicts of interest with such groups… and probably has been like that from the beginning of democracies.

It seems easy to imagine that many may find justified such actions (call out invalid the elections) under evidence of foreign interference but I see a grey line on the mechanisms that happened here, and we still do not call on responsibility to the voter on reflecting what is voting, specially when the media is influenced in spread a particular consensus or debate.

I am afraid that hope is only on the voting individual capabilities to react to media and to judge the reach of these conflicts of interest and the intelligence to decide how to vote (even to non favourite candidates or even voting in white), because in the end, a democracy blocking foreign interference can still be in the practice just a national group of interest blocking a foreign one.