Europe's feeble democracies

Dear Reader,

If you haven’t seen it already, it’s worth watching US Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference on Friday. On the surface at least, he ignored the conference’s raison d'être - international security - and instead dedicated his speech to attacking Europe for what he sees as a slide into Soviet-style authoritarianism.

Name-checking an annulled election in Romania, the Brandmauer against the AfD, and the increasing tendency of European states to censor people for posting unwanted opinions on social media, he warned that, in its confrontation with Russia, an authoritarian Europe will no longer be sure what it is fighting for.

“If you are running scared of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you,” he stated.

Given that Europeans are convinced that the shoe is on the other foot and that the US is sliding into authoritarianism, Vance’s speech led to fuses short-circuiting across the continent.

The Germans were up in arms, particularly over his call for an end to the “firewall” against the AfD. An editorial in Der Spiegel called the speech “historic” and thundered that “Europe can be in no doubt now that it is alone.”

On the second day of the conference, Olaf Scholz rewrote the start of his speech to lecture Vance on the lessons of Dachau, the concentration camp outside Munich that the Vice President had visited the day before. “‘Never again’ (to fascism) is the mission that Germany has been given and that it must fulfil every day,” he said in justification of the Brandmauer.

Friedrich Merz also cleaved an attack on Vance into a discussion on NATO defence spending, sniping at the Trump administration over the fact that a reporter was recently blacklisted at the White House for refusing to use Trump’s new name for the Gulf of Mexico. Later in the day, Annalena Baerbock used the conference’s main stage to describe Putin as the enemy abroad and the AfD as “the enemy within.”

What was the purpose of Vance’s undiplomatic speech? Was his statement that “there is nothing America can do for you” a veiled threat? Did he really mean that Europe needs to bow to Muskian libertarianism if it wants to keep American soldiers on its soil? That would seem unlikely. The US has no problem basing troops in autocratic countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Washington’s military strategy has never been primarily about upholding American values abroad.

US bases in Germany help them project their power across the globe. Ramstein Air Base is a key relay station for drone strikes in the Middle East; the US Africa Command is stationed in Stuttgart; and, just as was the case in the Cold War, having the wealthiest continent in the world on your side is a pretty big win in the rivalry with Russia and China.

The idea that the Trump Administration, of all US administrations, would base a major geopolitical decision on anything other than a cold calculation of the American national interest is laughable.

What is obvious is that Washington doesn’t want to - and can’t afford - to keep spending so much on military bases in Europe when it has more pressing priorities in the Pacific. That is why the US is so determined to see Europe increase its defence spending.

The part of Vance’s speech in which he warned that “there is nothing America can do for you” was about weak European governments no longer being able to pass budgets through their parliaments. “You need democratic mandates to achieve anything of value in the coming years,” he pointed out.

We only need to look to France, which has already fallen into a deep fiscal and political crisis, to see what he was talking about.

But Germany isn’t far behind. A feeble centrist government just collapsed in Berlin. The chances that we are going to have a stronger coalition after this month’s election are anything but promising. It's not even clear that the thing we once called a “grand coalition” between CDU and SPD will win enough seats to have a majority. On its current path, Germany is heading towards a stalemate.

And, of course Vance is right: the Brandmauer is to blame. Or, as he puts it: “I believe that shutting people out of the political process protects nothing; in fact it is the most sure-fire way to destroy democracy.”

If you look at a map of how constituency seats are likely to be divided up after the election, almost everything east of the former inner-German border is going to go blue (AfD). A Bundestag in which the AfD are excluded from all meaningful votes is one in which the East is de facto excluded from the democratic process. Thirty-five years after reunification, the West has given the East a democracy in which they have no voice.

For any liberally-minded person that should be a development that leads to reflection on the morality of such a rigid ostracization of the AfD, which excludes them on all political themes and in all political chambers from the district level all the way up to the Bundestag.

However, attempts to grapple with this moral conundrum are completely absent from the public debate. Don’t expect to read any opinion pieces on the pages of Germany’s liberal newspapers that grapple with this problem - you won’t find one.

Vance made his speech in Munich a day after an Islamist terrorist had driven a car into a trade union march just a few hundred meters away, killing a mother and her child. As he pointed out, on the question of migration, European leaders have been ignoring what voters have been trying to tell them at the ballot box for years.

Obviously, this isn’t healthy for democracy! And obviously, this has an impact on national security issues!

Leaders who ignore their public on one fundamental concern lack the authority to make big decisions on others. A Germany in which the AfD hadn’t been allowed to grow like an undiagnosed cancer is also one in which leaders wouldn’t have to fear the political fallout of supplying Ukraine with cruise missiles or hiking defence spending by €50 billion a year.

This point was underscored by the limp performances of Germany’s leaders at the Munich Security Conference.

Once Scholz had finished riffing on the holy mission that had been passed down to him by the walls of Dachau (a statement that wouldn’t have been complete without a reference to the infamous “Vogelschiss”), he got down to doing what he does best: scholzing around on Germany’s “unwavering” support for Ukraine.

The US and Germany are “by far” the largest donors to Ukraine, he reminded the audience, before explaining that Germany’s aid accounted for a much larger portion of its GDP - i.e. Germany is the best. Of course, what he failed to mention is that Poland, Denmark, Sweden and most of northern and eastern Europe spend far more of their GDP on arming Ukraine than Germany does.

Later in the day, Friedrich Merz sat on a panel next to Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen. While Frederiksen, who has banished the far-right to the fringes with her strict migration policies, spoke authoritatively about the need for Europe to rearm and jack up defence spending, Merz squirmed out of giving direct answers.

He “didn’t want to talk about money,” he said, when asked to put a figure on new NATO defence targets. He was “willing” to supply Kyiv with cruise missiles but “only as part of a common European framework,” he replied when asked about Taurus. (No one knows what that second statement means, because both France and the UK already supply cruise missiles to Ukraine.)

If Europe is looking for leadership in the era of Trump, it certainly won’t find it in Berlin.

Germany’s elite have become far too comfortable posturing against democratic rivals by conjuring phantoms of the past. All the while, they are crippling their country’s ability to act on the existential threats that really matter.

That someone broke out of the diplomatic blandishments of the Munich Security Conference to address this elephant in the room was no bad thing. That it was met with protestations that Germany is “fighting the enemy within” only served to underline the point.