Year XXXVIII, Number 1, March 2025

Nicola Vallinoto
Congress Vice-Chair of the World Federalist Movement. Editor of the International Democracy Newsletter

2025 begins with a decisive battle for Europe and for the whole world: not only for technological sovereignty, but for the very survival of democracy. The stakes could not be higher. Under the guise of defending free speech, an alliance of tech oligarchs and populist leaders is attempting to dismantle democratic institutions and undermine the rule of law[1].

In his farewell address to the nation, Joe Biden warned American citizens of the rise of “an oligarchy of extreme wealth, power, and influence ... that threatens our democracy, fundamental rights, and freedoms.”

Biden’s warning also applies to citizens around the world. The concentration of political, technological and financial power in the hands of a very few people is symbolized by the union between Elon Musk and Donald Trump and supported by the main players in American technological capitalism who quickly aligned themselves with the new power. Mark Zuckerberg announced the abandonment of the fact-checking system by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp in open defiance of the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA). After this announcement, Google also reiterated that it does not intend to integrate fact-checking systems into content published on Search and YouTube, as required by the European Commission's rules of conduct on disinformation.

The technological, political and financial oligarchy is a threat to democracies on every continent. Elon Musk intervenes frequently in various European countries through his social network X, which he claims to use as a tool of political influence, despite it being run at a loss. His support for the neo-Nazi party Alternative für Deutschland, which supports Germany leaving the EU, is just one example of the clear encroachment in European politics by the richest person in the world.

Musk financed Donald Trump's election campaign for the US elections with large sums of money, receiving in return a top-level governmental role, which would be perceived and prosecuted as corruption elsewhere.

Trump and Musk's European agenda is based on the principle of “divide and conquer”, dealing with individual countries instead of the EU to obtain the best possible result, given their weakness. It is understandable why the leaders of nationalist parties were invited to Trump's inauguration ceremony, but not the representatives of European institutions.

In this scenario, a “government of the few” is advancing, one that does not love democracy and its rules and that places itself above and against the “government of the many”, or the “people”. Opposing the “power of the few”, today as in the past, is the best way to protect democracy.

It seems difficult to oppose the excessive power of multi-billionaire technological elites. In fact, nation states have allowed them to grow undisturbed without being able to set any serious limits. Only now has this been done by European Union legislation, against which they are therefore lashing out, also trying to use the power of the USA.

In this context, the new frontier of space and communications control plays a strategic role, and Musk is likely to try to use it to his advantage, starting in Italy, which is at the center of this crisis in which the agenda promoted by the Trump-Musk duo seeks to weaken democratic institutions and undermine the rule of law while masking itself behind the pretext of defending freedom of speech.

The whirlwind trip in early January 2025 of the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to Mar-a-Lago, to Donald Trump's private residence, officially to discuss the release of journalist Cecilia Sala, sparked a series of controversies following the news published by the Bloomberg news agency about the agreement being negotiated with Elon Musk for an investment of one and a half billion euros by the Italian government in his telecommunications company SpaceX for the supply of the encrypted satellite communications service Starlink. A note from Palazzo Chigi, published shortly after the news, denied that a contract had been signed, but not that negotiations were underway. If the Italian government were to decide to adopt Starlink for its secure satellite communications, it would risk entrusting an American multinational with control over critical national infrastructures.

The President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, has also highlighted the risks of such a choice on more than one occasion. In his end of year 2023 speech to senior institutional figures, Mattarella warned against “oligarchs from different backgrounds” who “challenge each other in underwater exploration, in new space missions, in the development of very expensive satellite systems (with military implications) and in the control of social communication platforms, acting, more and more often, as real counterpowers”. And at the end of 2024, in his traditional speech to the ambassadors, Mattarella once again highlighted the risks to democracy associated with the increasingly invasive activity of “international operators free from any homeland, whose financial power today exceeds that of medium-sized states, and whose management of essential services often borders on a monopolistic condition”.

“An agreement with Starlink would be a serious strategic error for Italy, which would thus renounce its sovereignty, weakening and diluting its leadership role in IRIS², the European satellite program alternative to that of Elon Musk,” said MEP Christophe Grudler, Rapporteur and negotiator for the European Parliament of IRIS², who pointed out: “Entrusting critical defense communications to a private non-European actor undermines sovereignty and security. Italy risks becoming dependent on someone outside the EU's jurisdiction, whose decisions may not be in line with Italian interests.”[2]

In conclusion, we return to the words of Christophe Grudler: "Space must be a sector in which Europe does not depend on anyone else, so that it can have its destiny in our hands. We made the mistake with GAFAM twenty years ago, letting others impose technologies on us, and today we depend on them for internet access. It was the same debate with GPS and Galileo, but today the European system is the most precise in the world![3]

The future of the EU depends on the choices made today. These are choices that must be made collectively with all European partners, because there are no national ways out. For this reason, Europeans must decide whether they want to be protagonists in the construction of European sovereignty, with the creation of a capacity for political governance at the EU level also in the digital field (and in the space sector), or whether they want to become passive spectators in a world dominated by others.

[1] Francesca Bria, Domani, 12 Jan. 2025. Techno-populism versus democracy: wake-up call for Europe in 2025

[2] Paolo Anastasio, Luigi Garofalo, 'Ecco perché è un errore per l'Italia affidarsi a Starlink. Sì agli Eurobond per lo Spazio'. Interview with Christophe Grudler, the man of IRIS² of the EU Parliament, key4biz

[3] Interview with Christophe Grudler, rapporteur of the European IRIS² constellation, Air&Cosmos International.