Of the three forthcoming elections of consequence in Europe, the first heart-stopper occurs on March 15 in Holland, where Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom (P.V.V.) leads the polls despite his recent conviction for inciting racial hatred. He may triple his representation in Parliament from 12 to 36 seats and form the next government. Wilders says he will ban all Islamic symbols, mosques, and the Quran from the Netherlands and shut the country’s borders to migrants. This would be a great blow to Europe but, to be frank, there’s not much Russia could do to increase the suspicion of Islam in Holland. Then comes France, where there will likely be a run-off on May 7 between the National Front candidate Marine Le Pen and the mainstream conservative François Fillon. Orthodox opinion says that Fillon will beat Le Pen with a grand alliance of left and right, and recent movement in the polls supports that theory. But in the age of Trump and Brexit, nothing is guaranteed, and after a succession of horrific attacks by ISIS over the last two years, Le Pen might just pull off a victory. I was surprised how many members of the enlightened middle classes I found in Paris last winter who were contemplating a vote for Le Pen. The atmosphere in France will be extremely tense for the next few months and Russian hackers may play on that. They have a record of cyber-attacks in France, too. In April 2015, TV5Monde, which broadcasts around the world and had then just launched a new channel, was taken off the air by a hack from a group calling itself Cyber Caliphate, which turned out to be Russian. The station would have lost everything but for technicians who happened to be on site for the launch. "One of them was able to locate the very machine where the attack was taking place and he was able to cut out this machine from the Internet and it stopped the attack," said Yves Bigot, director general of the station.

It is unlikely that the E.U. would survive the fall of France to the National front, which has promised a referendum on the country’s E.U. membership. It certainly couldn’t survive a victory by the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Germany’s new far-right party, which has flourished since Merkel’s decision to accept 1 million refugees during the great migration of 2015.

Anyone who witnessed the stream of migrants traveling from Greece to Germany last year, as I did, knew that the magnanimous and humane offer would yield disastrous results, and Merkel has since regretted it publicly. The chief suspect in the attack on a Berlin Christmas market, in which 12 people were killed and 48 seriously injured, is a Tunisian who was under covert surveillance because of an intelligence tip-off, and who after the attack traveled all the way to Milan, where he was killed in a shoot out. The German security services are under intense pressure to explain how he was allowed to vanish from the security radar a few weeks back. For the German public, it will be just as important that Anis Amri was an asylum seeker who arrived in Germany in 2015. Since the attack, Merkel has become politically isolated and although she has announced that she will stand for a fourth term as chancellor, she is now likely to face a challenge from Martin Schulz, who recently resigned from the presidency of the European Parliament. Her party has steadily declined in the polls over the last two years while Frauke Petry’s AfD has steadily climbed. As things stand, Petry and the AfD cannot win, yet there is a long way to go to the election, which is likely to be held between September and late October. According to Merkel, in the months since her party’s computer's were targeted, cyber intrusions by Russia are now a daily event, but the more likely intervention will come in the shape of toxic lies spread in the news media and on the Web, like the case involving a 13-year-old girl from a Russian immigrant family who was said by Russian Channel One TV station to have been raped by “southern-looking” asylum seekers. The police established that the girl was not abducted and not forced into sex, but not before the story took off and there were widespread demonstrations by Russians living in Germany. Expect more of this before the elections.