Probably depends on how much money you spend. But spend enough and at a minimum it’ll be considered election interference (the exact rules depend on the country). If there’s evidence the candidate that benefited collaborated with you in any way, then it’s likely they’ll face sanctions as well.
Europe is like the U.S. We don’t have Political Action Committees here, or anything similar. Political campaigns, particularly in the lead up to an election, are tightly controlled and limited to ensure candidates have to compete on an even playing field. They can’t just try and outspend their competitors.
Heck in the UK, it’s illegal for political campaigning to occur outside the few weeks before an election. Obviously politicians will do everything they can to demonstrate their value to the people all the time. But they can’t engage in explicit campaigning, with calls to actions about how to vote, outside of the time limited campaign period. It’s all done to keep as much money as possible out of our political system, and prevent our politics becoming ruled entirely by money, like we see in the U.S. Hell there recently been huge controversy in the UK because out PM accepted some clothes (literally a few suits) from a party donor, and that was considered as being potentially illegal campaign support.
U.S. presidential elections regularly result in campaign spending measured in billions of dollars per side. In the UK spending is capped at just £53,000 per constituency, which means a total of £34m of spending for a party with candidates in every constituency.
Campaign spending in the U.S. is literally two orders of magnitude greater, the fact that someone wins while only spending $2billion rather than $3billion really doesn’t say that much. Musks contributions to Trump alone are an order of magnitude greater than the total spend allowed for an entire party in the UK.
Europe is like the U.S. We don’t have Political Action Committees here, or anything similar. Political campaigns, particularly in the lead up to an election, are tightly controlled and limited to ensure candidates have to compete on an even playing field. They can’t just try and outspend their competitors.
Heck in the UK, it’s illegal for political campaigning to occur outside the few weeks before an election. Obviously politicians will do everything they can to demonstrate their value to the people all the time. But they can’t engage in explicit campaigning, with calls to actions about how to vote, outside of the time limited campaign period. It’s all done to keep as much money as possible out of our political system, and prevent our politics becoming ruled entirely by money, like we see in the U.S. Hell there recently been huge controversy in the UK because out PM accepted some clothes (literally a few suits) from a party donor, and that was considered as being potentially illegal campaign support.