President Donald Trump’s election was greeted in Europe with outright fear by parties of the Left and wary apprehension by the center-right, but with open elation by a resurgent sovereigntist Right. Now the Left and the center are regrouping and coming up with a strategy to rein in the surging populists.
It should surprise no one that this strategy is based on the twin pillars of lawfare and censorship. Yes, the American Left failed horribly when it used both to try to stop Trump in the 2024 elections. Yet in Europe, the defense of liberty is less entrenched in the mind of voters.
We just saw the two approaches clash after Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Elon Musk expressed exasperation when a close ally, Germany, took an initial step in barring the country’s most popular party, the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland.
Germany’s week-old government—a living experiment in the new politics of circling the wagons at the center, being itself a strange-bedfellows coalition of the center-right Christian Democrats and the leftist Social Democrats—responded by warning the Trump administration to stay out of its domestic affairs.
To be sure, the generalized statement that Europeans are less zealous of their freedom than Americans requires qualification.
Eastern Europe, with a much more recent memory of living in tyranny, is largely more vigilant of losing liberty than is Western Europe, where decades of the welfare state have created constituencies more willing to engage in the illusory bargain of trading a bit of freedom for a bit of comfort.
The parties on the Right, in both West and East, also want more sovereign independence and less interference from the European Union in such matters as freedom of expression. They are the ones that welcomed Trump as the start of a tidal wave they hoped would reach the Old Continent.
“Everybody understands that something has changed,” I quoted Marine Le Pen, leader of Rassemblement Nationale, France’s largest opposition party, as telling a crowd at a Patriots rally in Madrid less than a month after Trump’s inauguration. “The results of the American election will sound the awakening of the Old Continent.”
Well, the center-right and Left have taken notice of the Trump tsunami, too, and they want to raise a few dams.
In terms of lawfare, French courts have convicted Le Pen of embezzlement, a charge she strongly denies, and barred her from running for president in 2027. In Germany, the new government has just allowed the security services to classify AfD as “extremist,” a first step before banning the party outright.
And in Spain, the country’s fiscal court has fined Vox, the third-largest party, 862,000 euros for financial irregularities.
All are test cases for how far the Left and center-right are willing to go using the courts to do what they can’t at the ballot box. Expressions of concern about deviating from democratic practices have multiplied.
Rubio didn’t mince words, writing on X, “Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy—it’s tyranny in disguise. What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD—which took second in the recent election—but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes. Germany should reverse course.”
Similarly, Vance wrote, “The AfD is the most popular party in Germany, and by far the most representative of East Germany. Now the bureaucrats try to destroy it.”
Even the Reuters news agency story on Le Pen warned that the “a seismic ruling that could fuel global tensions over judicial efforts to police politics,” one “likely to exacerbate growing global anger among right-wing leaders over unelected judges meddling in their mandates.”
But lawfare is not the only arrow in the center’s quiver. The use of censorship, ostensibly to stop “disinformation,” is another. “Disinformation” is often just information unwelcome to those in power.
The EU has led this fight more frontally. Commission President Ursula von Der Leyen says she wants to build “societal immunity around information manipulation.” She wants to censor information, rather than meeting information with which she disagrees with a counterargument, because “prebunking” is preferable to “debunking.”
“Prevention is preferable to cure,” von Der Leyen said. “It is much better to vaccinate so that the body is inoculated.”
In the U.S., a blow was struck for freedom of expression online when Musk bought Twitter. But the EU has made clear that online debate will be fettered by “content moderation” rules laid down in the Digital Services Act, which the European Conservative rightly labels the EU’s “censorship tool.
“The rules voted by our co-legislators must be enforced,” von der Leyen told Politico in late April. “That’s why we’ve opened cases against TikTok, X, Apple, Meta.”
The EU has even brought in the infamous Nina Jankowitz, whom Biden tried to turn into a “disinformation” tzar before public outrage brought that appointment to a halt.
Jankowitz is now a vocal critic of the freedom of expression in her country, telling the EU Parliament at a hearing in late April, “I would like to call upon you stand firm against another autocracy: the United States of America. The Trump administration is undoubtedly preparing a pressure campaign to force EU institutions to roll back regulation like the DSA.”
One could say that if the governments that Europeans elect choose to step on freedom, that is their affair. However, as Vance has already reminded Europeans, we have an alliance in NATO that is based on common values. Once these begin to diverge, will the alliance suffer?
Originally published by the Washington Examiner
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow in the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Read his research.
Reprinted with permission from The Daily Signal by Mike Gonzalez.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
The governments of Germany, France and as of yesterday the U.K. are effectively nothing more than authoritarian socialist regimes masquerading as so-called “democracies” today. The rights and freedoms of the people are being suppressed daily, in order to perpetuate the continued rule of the Leftists in power. All one has to do is look at the daily news reports of the rising amounts of protests against the ever more expansive control and subjugation of the populace.
Free speech is effectively dead in all three countries, with the governments arresting people merely for posting or uttering in public an opposing view to official government policy for the government officials running things. News outlets or newspapers that voice any position critical of government policy is either quickly shut down or they are slapped with massive fines, that effectively put them out of business. Dissent is NOT tolerated in these increasingly authoritarian regimes. Meanwhile, crime is of course steadily rising, as local law enforcement is now preoccupied with either arresting or fining the average citizen for suspected violations of the authoritarian rules.
“No Go” zones are increasing all across western Europe, as the leaders of these three nations echo many of the same talking points we heard from the Democrats and Biden administration not that long ago regarding open borders and massive amounts of illegals. The people of western Europe see the trend and they clearly don’t like the direction they are being pushed.
What we get charged on our credit cards is twice what it is in Canada and SEVEN times what they would have to pay in Europe. So let them put NATO on their credit cards! They can afford it, we cannot!
If such is the case with the old NATO allies: “Mit solchen Freunden, wer braucht Feinden?”
One has to wonder why President Trump doesn’t honor his campaign promises regarding getting the hell out of the Ukraine mess. Instead it seems he dispatched a clueless retired neo con general whose daughter runs an outfit that supplies parties in various conflicts with munitions and mercenaries. One wonders who pulled strings to get her into her position which is quite lucrative for the kellogg family. Anyway the good General seems to have grown fond of the tyrannical EU governing parties and presses Trump relentlessly to do the bidding of the EU.
Now Trump, somehow with a straight face maintains the Ukraine conflict is “Bidens War and never would have started if I had been President”. Strange seeing as how he WAS President during the time when tens upon tens of billions were sent the way of Ukraine for arms and training for that corrupt Nazi infested country. I wish we had real journalists so one could ask President Trump about the apparent hypocrisy. Regardless, Trump can still simply stop supplying further arms to the corrupt fascist state of Ukraine and just tell the EU nations that wish to maintain our never ending money train to Ukraine that gets filtered through their white gloved hands, to shut up and maybe work toward not having senior citizens die from exposure AGAIN this coming winter as they did during the last.
Honor your campaign promises President Trump, please sir.
Why are we so concerned with politics in Europe? We wouldn’t want Europeans telling us what political parties we should and shouldn’t have. The Germans and French can decide what they want. I’m not seeing articles about Russian citizens and their “lack of freedom of expression” or how Putin decides what they can and can’t do at the ballot box.