Even though it’s only Wednesday, the authoritarians in Europe have had a fantastic month.
Marine Le Pen, the party’s head and the front-runner in the 2027 presidential election, was given a five-year ban by a French court on Monday. A child was expelled from a U.K. preschool for not being sufficiently friendly of LGBT politics, according to The Telegraph report the same day. A British couple made the revelations over the weekend that they had been detained based on the problems they made on WhatsApp about their mother’s people school.
In a speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vice President J. D. Vance criticized involved European leaders for their repression of free speech. The utter nonsense of this week confirms that Vance’s grave instructions were accurate.
Vance criticized the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, and the European Union for silencing and demonizing free speech in their people, citing police attacks against Germans for online comments and the trial of a British person who dared to pray in solitude outside of an abortion service.
He said,” A cross Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.” That is perhaps understated.
Not only has France banned democratic opposition candidates from holding votes. The highest court in Romania suspended its presidential poll in December on the grounds of Russian intervention. ( Where was that phrase before? ) Before the judge canceled the vote and subsequently prohibited Georgescu from running once more, Calin Georgescu, who cast himself as a Trumpy” Romania second” member, took the lead in the nation’s first round of voting.
Leftists in the German parliament have been threatening a ban on Germany’s renowned right-wing party Alternative , für , Deutschland ( AfD ). According to Politico, lawmakers in January considered asking the country’s highest court to “examine whether the AfD is an anti-constitutional party” as the” first step toward , legally banning it , under German law.” As she attempted to remove the party from the democratic process, leftist lawmaker Carmen Wegge, one of the supporters behind the initiative, claimed AfD posed “dangers to democracy.”
France is the most recent instance of what Vance deemed to be a disturbing trend of” European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others.”
Le Pen, who had a double-digit lead over the next closest candidate in France’s presidential election, was also fined and sentenced to two years in prison, which will likely result in two years of house arrest. Le Pen was charged with complex financial crimes, just like Donald Trump, and her opponents were eagerly using the “rule of law” to defend their prosecution of political opponents. Trump himself didn’t overlook the similarities.
Le Pen said to reporters after the verdict was made:” I’m eliminated, but there are millions of French people whose voices are actually being eliminated.”
She’s correct, the voices of European citizens are being silenced, not just by courts forbid them by excluding their favorite candidates from elections. Europeans are no longer free to express their opinions without fear of retribution from the government, from parents to preschoolers.
Authorities have charged 292 people and found 67 guilty under the anti-speech law since Britain’s” Online Safety Act” became effective in October 2023. The law targets “mis- and disinformation” and criminalizes “false information intended to cause non-trivial harm” among other things. A mother posted video of police arresting her autistic daughter months before the law became law because she said a female police officer resembled her lesbian grandmother. A 16-year-old was detained on suspicion of a homophobic public order offence, according to a West Yorkshire Police spokesman who spoke to the BBC.
The Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Bureau of the U.S. State Department issued a statement on Sunday informing people of their concerns” about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom.” The State Department brought up Livia Tossici-Bolt’s case last month in court for holding a sign next to an abortion facility with the words “here to talk, if you want.”
Britain’s authoritarian speech codes undermine Starmer’s case for special treatment from the United States as U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer tries — so far, unsuccessfully — to avoid upcoming tariffs from the Trump administration. Someone “familiar with trade negotiations” claimed that the United Kingdom deserves” no free trade without free speech,” according to The Telegraph.
In Germany, where 16 distinct “online hate task forces” are tasked with detaching online commenters who are accused of publishing “hateful” or false statements, things are no better. According to a CBS report, just one of those 16 units “works on about 3,500 cases a year.”
German prosecutors readily admitted to CBS that it is against the law to “insult someone in public” or even to post false information online. Germans whose words cross the line of duty face home searches by armed police, fines or imprisonment, and/or confiscated phones and laptops.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act, which went into effect last year, makes it possible for anyone who finds themselves in a position of hate to speak out against it on the continent. Brendan Carr, the head of the Trump-era Federal Communications Commission, criticized the legislation as “incompatible” with the “free speech tradition.”
The prohibition of political candidates from elections and acing citizens for the expression of ideas are two sides of the same authoritarian coin. Both are incompatible with self-government.
According to Vance,” [S]hutting down media, elections, or excluding people from the political process is the most surefire way to destroy democracy,” as Vance said to European leaders in February.
He was correct. Unfortunately, it appears that European leaders have treated his statement more like an instruction manual than an urgent warning.
The Federalist’s editor of elections is Elle Purnell. Her work has been featured on Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B. A. in government from Patrick Henry College, with a journalism minor. Follow her on Twitter at @ellepurnell.
