Europe is its own worst enemy

Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech condemning Europe’s abandonment of basic western values was a seminal moment in US-European relations. It provoked immediate praise from American conservatives and disparagement from European leaders, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Critics and admirers both recognized the significance of Vance’s message. The February 14 speech, which Mr. Vance gave on his first trip abroad as vice president, yielded millions of views on X and spawned dozens of op-eds in response.

At the Munich Security Conference – typically a venue to discuss defense spending and the like – Mr Vance told the entire European leadership class that they themselves are the biggest threat to European security. He essentially condemned the use of the courts and law enforcement agencies by the elites to conduct lawfare against their own citizens.

Clearly, that type of talk in Germany took guts. It also was an overdue expression of the frustration many conservatives feel towards the left-wing Brussels commissariat for hypocritically lecturing Americans about the dangerous illiberalism of President Donald Trump, while ruthlessly policing dissent within their own borders. Nearly two months afterwards, the address is most notable for its prescience.

Since then, Europe has accelerated its anti-democratic conduct in an apparent effort to prove Mr. Vance’s thesis.

Last week, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Rally, along with several of her deputies, was convicted of misusing European Union funds. She was alleged to have committed a technical violation relating to payment of staff salaries.

Mrs. Le Pen was sentenced to two years of home confinement and a hefty fine. The frontrunner in France’s 2027 presidential election, she is now prohibited by the court from participating in national politics for the next five years.

Even the administration of Emmanuel Macron, who has remained personally close to Mr. Trump, despite Europe’s drift from the US, decried the court’s intervention in the French election. “Madame le Pen must be fought at the ballot box, not elsewhere,” said Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin.

Additionally, just weeks after Vance’s speech, another French court shut down the conservative network C8, one of the nation’s largest television channels with 9 million daily viewers, for content violations. This move is the equivalent of the left successfully pulling Fox News’s FCC broadcast license.

Examples of creeping authoritarianism across Europe extend well beyond the rulings of the French judiciary.

In Munich, the Vice President called out the government of Romania for canceling its presidential election on the flimsy pretense that “Russian disinformation” had infected the democratic process. A few weeks later, the former frontrunner in that contest – and the most popular politician in Romania – Cǎlin Georgescu was arrested by Romanian authorities for “incitement to action against the constitutional order” while traveling to register to run in the next presidential election. As a result, Mr. Georgescu missed the registration deadline, and a court barred his name from appearing on the upcoming ballot.

Arresting electoral front-runners – in other words, abandoning the very notion of a free election – is the most aggressive, heavy-handed form of political oppression. It is a measure of last-resort that’s usually only associated with Russia, China and tinpot dictatorships across the developing world. In Europe, such conduct, especially by the courts, has been rare – until recently.

Many Americans learned about Europe’s suppression of free speech for the first time from a 60 Minutes special that aired the weekend after Mr.Vance’s speech. CBS interviewed state prosecutors from Germany’s hate speech unit. One admitted that Germany has 16 regional hate speech task forces charged with policing German’s online speech. According to one of the prosecutors, the Lower Saxony unit alone reviews about 3,500 speech cases a year. With the publication of the 60 Minutes special, the Vice President’s criticism was validated in real time.

In Munich, Mr. Vance specifically criticized Scotland’s “safe access zones” law, which bans Scottish citizens from privately praying in their own homes if the home is located near an abortion clinic. After much hemming and hawing, the legislator responsible for the law, Gillian Mackay, admitted in a podcast that her law does, in fact, prohibit some private home prayer. As if to prove Mr. Vance’s point, the same week as his remarks, Scottish authorities arrested a 74-year-old woman, Rose Docherty, for trying to speak with abortion-seekers outside of an abortion clinic.

Concerningly, the anti-democratic crackdowns are even extending to former Soviet Republics. Estonia’s parliament, last week, amended the nation’s constitution to prevent its Russian ethnic minority from voting in local elections.

In one of the more stirring portions of his Munich address, Mr Vance reminded European leaders that in the cold war, the side that lost “censored dissidents… closed churches… canceled elections… They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty.”

Europe’s drift towards woke authoritarianism is a sign of fragility, not strength. As Americans grow increasingly aware of European backsliding on free speech and democracy, they’ll find themselves asking the obvious question: why are we subsidizing and defending allies who have rejected our core values?

Mr. Vance clearly understands, outcompeting China and keeping Europe safe from Russia, certainly requires increased defense spending. But even more importantly, it requires the commitment from our allies, to the Western values of free expression and fair elections. Now is the time to double down on those commitments – not to walk away from them.