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.
EUROPEAN ELITES DESTROY DEMOCRACY IN ORDER TO SAVE IT
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?
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its board of trustees.