Just months after Vice President J.D. Vance admonished European officials for censoring citizens, a new German governing coalition is preparing to further crack down on free expression, according to Bild, a Berlin-based media outlet.
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Christian Social Union (CSU) and Social Democratic Party (SDP) — three major German political parties — are forming their governing coalition to counter the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), which achieved its best-ever national results in February’s federal elections. Now, the incoming coalition’s pact is proposing to further restrict free speech in Germany and create a media oversight body to monitor “information manipulation,” according to a translated report by Bild and a Sunday op-ed by Filipp Piatov, the deputy head of Bild’s politics department.
The particular section of the pact that pertains to speech is called “Dealing with Disinformation,” according to Bild. That provision of the plan reportedly states that “the deliberate dissemination of false factual claims is not covered by freedom of expression” and states that the nongovernmental media oversight entity will look to crack down on things like “information manipulation” and “hate” while “preserving freedom of expression.”
The new governing coalition was assembled specifically to box out AfD, which put up its best-ever national performance in the 2025 German federal elections, according to Reuters. AfD is a right-wing populist party that opposes mass immigration to Germany, and the base of its support in the 2025 elections was primarily found in eastern Germany, which languished under Communist rule for decades following World War II.
“Nowhere is it written that one is obliged to disseminate only true facts,” Udo Vetter, a German criminal defense lawyer, told Bild. “In principle, this is the introduction of censorship.”
Moreover, the new coalition is also considering a new law to ban anyone who has been convicted of “incitement to hatred” twice or more from holding public office in Germany, Piatov wrote in a Sunday piece for The Wall Street Journal.
“Some in the political class know these efforts won’t be enough. That’s why the coalition also plans to disqualify competitors via law. A new provision would bar anyone twice convicted of ‘incitement to hatred’ from holding public office. The government calls it a step to ‘strengthen the resilience of our democracy,’” Piatov wrote. “Berlin seems unwilling to recognize a simple political truth: You can’t contain extremist parties by narrowing democratic freedoms. If anything, such measures tend to fuel the populist movements they’re meant to suppress.”
During Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference in February, the vice president slammed the governments of Europe and Germany specifically for censoring their constituents.
“I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be, quote, ‘hateful content,’” Vance said during the speech. “Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of, quote, ‘combating misogyny on the internet, a day of action.’”
The new coalition’s plans for “dealing with disinformation” already have earned a nickname among the German populace: “the lying ban,” Piatov wrote.
Piatov detailed several instances of government censorship in Germany, such as one in which a German journalist was handed a seven month suspended jail sentence and had to apologize for posting a satirical image of German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser wearing a sign reading, “I hate freedom of speech.”
He further noted that he suspects German establishment authorities are reaching to reign in media that they cannot control as easily as the country’s major public broadcasting entities and other established news organizations.
European officials have stepped up their censorship of disfavored speech under the auspices of democracy promotion and protection for years. Germany is one of the worst offenders, where at least 98% of comments taken down on YouTube and Facebook over a two-week period in 2023 were actually found to be legally permissible, according to a May 2024 report by the Future of Free Speech, a non-partisan think tank located at Vanderbilt University.
“Now, to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or, God forbid, vote a different way, or, even worse, win an election,” Vance said in Munich.
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