Germany is about to get a new government, and the coalition agreement between the three parties (CDU, CSU, SPD) addresses the issue of speech – in a way that is at the same time perplexing, and unsurprising. Namely, it announces a further crackdown.
Filipp Piatov, deputy head of the politics department at Germany’s Bild newspaper, cites from the agreement in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal: “The deliberate dissemination of false factual claims is not protected by freedom of speech.”
Piatov sees some Orwellian qualities in the way that sentence is constructed, as well as in poorly defined and selectively applied rules that are supposed to regulate the sphere.
But he also sees the big picture where the German authorities – and there seems to be a common thread between the previous and the incoming government – are using censorship and criminal law to “reassert control over public discourse.”
This control is most notably being lost online, where Piatov calls populist parties are gaining influence. He doesn’t accept the argument that the criminal prosecution and judgement against journalist David Bendels, over a satirical meme featuring Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, was really an attempt to fight disinformation.
And the same goes for the motive behind Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck filing over 800 complaints alleging online insults – instead, the reason, according to Piatov, is “regaining control, which they sense is slipping away.”
And if that control and influence is suffering the biggest setbacks on social platforms, then the parties that rotate in Germany’s successive cabinets – accustomed to “a close relationship” with legacy media – blame those behind the platforms.
Germany, like many in the EU, is, to put it mildly, unhappy that Donald Trump is in the White House again, and in this context, Elon Musk’s ownership of X and Mark Zuckerberg’s of Meta is unsettling the entrenched elites.
However, censorship, and much less the “blame game,” aren’t likely to be enough to stop the parties outside that club from continuing to grow influence online.
That’s where the plan to prohibit anyone who is convicted of “incitement to hatred” twice from holding office comes in.
The truth that Piatov – who uses the terms “extremist” and “populist” interchangeably – believes Germany’s authorities are failing to understand is that, “you can’t contain extremist parties by narrowing democratic freedoms.”
