You're conflating parliamentary budget and staff with a campaign budget and staff. These documents came from his campaign, not a parliamentary office (be it EU or French). For obvious reasons the two don't mix. Campaigns generally operate on extremely restricted budgets, and are naturally transient in nature.
I think you just confused "a European Parliament" (that is, a national parliament in Europe) with "the European Parliament", which is a different thing altogether.
And then also confused an MP (or, in your interpretation, MEP) not having any infosec staff with the whole government (or EU) not having infosec staff.
But then, even with all that, your conclusion isn't all that wrong for the topic at hand; if a major power like Russia targets a particular politician in the West (perhaps aside from the official, rather than campaign, personality of the sitting head of state), there is likely to be a substantial resource asymmetry that favors the attacker.
No, he is saying that he is a member of a parliament. The lower house of the Irish parliament to be exact [0].
Might just be because the EU is a trade block, it doesn't have secretive military and intelligence institutions because it doesn't have any military and intelligence institutions at all.
Better let INTCEN, SIAC, SitCen, EUFOR and EUNAVFOR know that.
The EU is absolutely far, far more than a trade block.
In fact in France there is a general contempt from the political class and the medias for any candidate who is not a literary person.
At the level of Hillary and Macron, the money is there. If infosec people don't volunteer, they will need to be paid for, even if it means running less television ads or what not. Even in Europe campaigns have paid staff. It might mean cuts to something else, but is it worth skimping on security?
As an aside, I'm from the US and have never heard of a campaign looking for infosec volunteers. Are we sure no one would volunteer?
Wonders never cease.
Get real.
edit: Considering the response perhaps I should qualify. The major parties in most developed countries have permanent election teams with multi-million pound budgets. I cannot see why my response is in any way controversial.
edit: Regarding this...
> The major parties in all developed countries have permanent election teams with many multi-million pound budgets.
That's very likely. However, the bursty nature of elections means they're probably also onboarding thousands of volunteers and temporary staff in a very short period of time.
This is an ignorant statement. The many millions of hours of work freely given to producing, maintaining and supporting users of software licensed under Free Software [1] licenses shows it's not true.
I suspect it's just that ‘IT folks’ tend to be cynical about most political parties. So they would want to be paid for any work done for such outfits rather than doing it pro bono.
I'd suggest that politicians who expect they can get such work done for free are the ones who need to “get real”.
Political campaigns, outside of the States, are very much bootstrapped. And IT folks very much not minded to volunteer their time.
Citation: I'm a member of a European Parliament on his third term in politics. Of my 200+ volunteers, not one is in infosec. Within my party, maybe 60 staff total are paid for a campaign.