We all know the old joke: when a European referendum delivers the “wrong” outcome, the country votes again until they get it “right”. The EU thought this would be the case after Brexit. But so far, no one’s laughing.
If anything, things have got worse. Take Romania, which recently cancelled its presidential election when Călin Georgescu, leader of a nationalist Right coalition, won the first round. Thierry Breton, former French European Commissioner, revealed the EU’s mindset during a damning recent TV interview. “We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary,” he said. In other words, if you can’t beat the far-Right, ban them.
I disagree with almost everything Breton has ever said, but I am grateful to him for stating his case with such revealing clarity. During his time as industry commissioner in Brussels, from 2019 until last summer, when Emmanuel Macron replaced him with a more compliant figure, he was the driving force behind a series of laws designed to keep Europe in the digital dark ages. The most extreme of which is the Digital Services Act (DSA) which compels “very large online platforms”, such as X and Meta, to check facts and filter out fake news.
But, thanks to Breton, the truth is out there. Europe’s ultimate aim isn’t to save public discourse, it is to suffocate far-Right parties by depriving them of the oxygen of information. The DSA isn’t even the last word in the EU’s anti-digital jihad. One of Ursula von der Leyen’s big ideas last year during the European election was the so-called “democracy shield” — effectively launching even more legislation to prevent outside interference in EU affairs. This notion conjures up images of laser beams and light-sabre fights. And in some respects it’s not far from the truth: a frightened bloc needs a shield to protect itself from the encroaching enemy.
Mark Zuckerberg is certainly on the attack. Last week he announced that he is abandoning fact-checking on his platforms — effectively defying the DSA. And he is betting on Donald Trump to protect him from the legal consequences. Given that J.D. Vance, the Vice President-elect, has already threatened to end US support for Nato if Europe tries to censor Elon Musk’s X, surely the same will apply to Facebook. And the EU is far too dependent on the US to be able to mount an effective campaign against any of America’s social media platforms once Trump is president. The DSA, hastily drawn up during the pandemic, not only misjudges the nature of the social media, it misjudges political power. It exposes Europe’s essential weakness before America.
This isn’t just a geopolitical battle, though. It is also a European one. The attempted clampdown reveals that there is something the bloc fears more than free speech: populism. MEPs found it hard enough to stomach Nigel Farage’s brutal outbursts when he was a member of the European Parliament. Now they have Musk breathing down their neck, endorsing candidates from the AfD, a party that sits on the far-Right in the European Parliament’s benches and which supports German withdrawal from the EU.
The German media had a collective breakdown when Musk tweeted an endorsement for the AfD, interviewed Alice Weidel, the party’s co-leader, on X, and then endorsed her in an article for Die Welt. The op-ed editor of the German daily resigned in protest. And an article in another newspaper hysterically described Musk’s intervention as unconstitutional. That journalists would advocate censorship seems shocking, until one understands the role of journalism in continental European society. It operates firmly inside a narrow centrist political consensus, which spans all the parties from the centre-left to the centre-right. Naturally, the AfD does not get much airtime in the German media.
But while marginalised by traditional media, the AfD thrives on TikTok, where it has large following. So what irks the German media, and politicians from other parties, is that the censorship cartel is no longer functioning as well as it once did. In the US and in the UK, the once mighty legacy media have already lost their power. Hillary Clinton expressed the frustration perhaps most clearly when she said that social media companies must fact check, or else “we lose total control”. But Europe still lives in a twilight zone where the traditional media still basks in the dwindling sunset of power, trying to ignore social media rising on the other horizon. Like all the modern political battles in Europe, this is about protecting vested interests.
The Romanian case demonstrates how these restrictions on freedom of speech are the first salvos in a greater war of repression. The presidential elections there were cancelled on the grounds that a Russian-infested TikTok had misinformed voters. I am sure that the Russians were active. But it is shocking to think that an election was cancelled because someone lied on TikTok.
Let’s be clear, there was no suggestion of any vote rigging. Georgescu won the first round of the election fair and square. But as with the laughable misperception in Brussels after the Brexit vote, the presumption behind the EU’s support for the nullification of the result, was that voters were too stupid to make up their own mind. The rerun is to take place on 4 May, followed by a run-off between the most successful candidate two weeks later. Georgescu is still the most likely candidate to win according to opinion polls, but the Romanian political establishment is still determined to find ways to disbar him, the most promising of which is the hope that he may have received undeclared funds.
There are similar patterns elsewhere. Marine Le Pen faces potential disqualification from the 2027 presidential elections following accusations of irregularities regarding her assistants in the European Parliament. More recently, Brussels was spooked by the victory in Austria of the Freedom Party, which managed to obtain 28.8% of the vote in the September general election. It surpassed a threshold at which point it became politically impossible for the other parties to form coalitions. Herbert Kickl, the FPÖ’s leader, is now likely to become Austria’s next chancellor. Meanwhile, in Germany, a group of 113 MPs has ganged up to ban the AfD. Their story is that the far-Right wants to destroy democracy. While the party is not yet polling high enough to frustrate yet another centrist coalition in Berlin after next month’s elections, Germany may only be a few percentage points away from an Austrian-style impasse.
Surely, though, the sensible approach to the rise of the AfD, the FPÖ and other parties of the Right is not to censor them, but to address the underlying problem that has made them so strong: persistent economic uncertainty, loss of purchasing power, and dysfunctional policies on migration. Failing that, why not co-opt parties of the far-Right as junior coalition partners as they did in Sweden and Finland? If Weidel were suddenly thrust into the job of economics minister, we would see whether she could defend her record in government. But the centrist parties in Germany and France do neither. They have erected political firewalls against the far-Right. And they are doubling down with the same old policies.
It’s an approach that will inevitably backfire. A banned Le Pen would be far more dangerous for the centrist establishment, and possibly even more extreme when she eventually gets to power. Likewise the AfD would surely be radicalised after a ban.
Until then, the EU’s blunt weapons of choice — the legal bans, political firewalls, and censorship — will inflict more self-harm than good. In the pecking order of democratic rights, freedom of speech has a relatively low priority in Europe. Like the creatures in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, I am struggling to spot the difference between the extremists of the Right, and those who are trying to fight them.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/