Europe’s Growing Free Speech Problem

​The historian Robert Paxton notes that governments of all stripes are susceptible to authoritarian trappings, especially when their narratives suggest “obsessive preoccupation with community decline.”

This happens when power elites – whether left, center, or right – become convinced of their correctness close ranks to maintain dominance. Before long, they begin acting “in ways quite contrary” to their professed beliefs – a pattern Vice President J.D. Vance condemned in a blistering critique of Europe’s entrenched interests in Munich in February).

All this makes a recent post by Jonathan Turley particularly resonant. “Free speech is in a free fall in Europe,” he observes. This dynamic helps explain why Germany’s tendency to censor speech continues to find new targets:

• A comment mocking a politician’s weight warranted a criminal inquiry

 

• An opposition newspaper editor was indicted and fined for posting a meme ridiculing the hypocrisy of a minister’s supposed support for free speech

 

• A Bavarian pensioner was convicted for posting satirical Nazi-era images on X, because he did not make his critique of a government minister sufficiently clear

 

• Annual police raids target so-called “digital arsonists.”

Germany’s current coalition politicians seem intent on furthering, as the examples above demonstrate, crackdowns on speech. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Filipp Piatov excoriated this censorship:

“Germany’s establishment is fighting to reassert control over public discourse – especially online, where it’s losing ground. The main targets are social-media platforms and populist parties. The tools are censorship and criminal law.

“This isn’t really about fighting disinformation. It’s about regaining control, which they sense is slipping away.”

Alas, Germany is hardly alone in this regard. As we’ve written before – and undoubtedly will again – the European Union’s Digital Services Act threatens to censor the speech of Americans and other foreign citizens, making it the new price of simply doing business. Across the Channel, the increasingly restrictive United Kingdom seems locked in step with the EU.

There, the Online Safety Act is poised to wreak havoc on privacy, free speech, and even the safety of the children it purports to protect.
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Jonathan Turley is rightfully leery of EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s recent declaration of a Pax Europaea. If the current pattern of free speech violations holds, it signifies a larger abandonment of the shared values that helped build robust post-war democracies on both sides of the Atlantic.

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