Marine Le Pen is on track to win the presidential election next year. What does the French power elite do? It uses a case of misuse of EU funds for party purposes to sentence Le Pen to three years in prison. No one believes that this judgment is what it purports to be. Other parties have done exactly the same as the Rassemblement National. Yet it is she who is sentenced.
Some in the power elite wish to send a signal. It was the same signal they sent when they cancelled the second round of the presidential election in Romania in 2024. At the time, it was threatened that the same might be necessary if Alice Weidel and the AfD won the election in Germany.
Work is being done both within the EU and the nation states to isolate a political direction that the elite has branded as the enemy by drawing the line back to National Socialism. They make use of the weapon from Orwell’s book «1984»: He who controls history controls the present and the future.
The elite claims that the AfD and the new right do not respect and do not represent the values on which the EU and the democracies are built. But it is their definition of freedom of speech. They want us to believe that freedom of speech must be controlled. That censorship means freedom. It is pure Orwell.
This totalitarian language seeps into the political conversation. Pride is used as a weapon. Even Sylvi Listhaug says: Everyone shall be allowed to love whom they want.
Trump’s America does not say that. They ban trans men from women’s sport, as well as «gender-affirming» treatment.
This explains some of the anger towards JD Vance when he praises the AfD and says it is Germany’s hope. The USA is ruining the EU’s attempt to sideline the new right. Trump himself represents the new right. Hence the hatred.
A hitherto unknown EU figure, the Authority for European Political Parties and Foundations (APPF), a kind of party supervisory body, has initiated a process to delist the bloc of parties on the new right in the European Parliament, the so-called ESN group.
ESN group, which was established in 2024 and has 27 members in the current European Parliament, consists among others of the German AfD, French Reconquête, Italian Futuro Nazionale (FN) and Czech Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), and is referred to by both system media and old power parties as «far right» or «right-wing extremist».
But to the elite’s horror and disappointment, this crusade is not without costs. A majority of German voters are against a ban on the AfD. The mere fact of having the stomach to propose banning a party that enjoys 30 per cent support says something about an elite that has thrown all inhibitions overboard. Is it in panic or completely deliberate?
Either way, it is bold, for the elite is not throwing down the gauntlet to Germany’s largest party, but to the millions of voters who say they will vote for them.
The elite invokes the 1930s and the struggle against National Socialism, but is itself moving in an authoritarian direction.
It is the irony of history: Those who combat an illegitimate newcomer employ the same methods as its historical predecessors.
The voters are not stupid. They know what censorship and suppression mean. It is not so long since the DDR fell. Now they feel the Stasi breathing down their necks.
How can Friedrich Merz believe that this will go well?
There are tragic precedents in German history.
When Germany capitulated in November 1918, the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert became leader of a provisional government, with party comrade Gustav Noske as head of the Reichswehr.
Germany had historically had a strong labour movement that wanted a reckoning with the militarism that led to the First World War.
The Independent Socialists sat in the government but left when their police chief was removed.
Workers occupied factories and newspapers. Half a million were on the move.
Freikorps, Berlin. Photo: Bundesarchiv
Then Noske deployed the Freikorps, who were known to be far out on the right. They crushed the uprising with great brutality. The two leaders of the Spartacist League, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were murdered in captivity. Noske is said to have remarked that «someone had to do the dirty work». The same methods were used to crush the People’s Republic in Bavaria. But in 1923 Hitler attempted a similar putsch in Munich.
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht
That too was crushed. But when Hitler came out of Landsberg prison and the economic crisis hit, it was his movement that could reap the benefits, because there was enmity between the communists and the Social Democrats. In fact, Moscow sent out the message that the enemy always stood on the right, i.e. the Social Democrats.
Moscow played the same role as the Islamists today. They are anti-democrats.
The Social Democrats squandered their chances, the communists even collaborated with the Nazis during the transport workers’ strike in Berlin.
One must learn from history, but today’s politicians seem determined to commit the same mistakes again.
You do not play with enabling acts and censorship in Germany. That is elementary.
But forgotten, both by Berlin and Brussels as well as by Paris.
Macron has assumed a sovereign air, as if it costs him not a calorie. He knows that the far left is satisfied as long as he ties Le Pen’s hands.
We saw the same under the Biden regime: The so-called liberals were satisfied as long as Trump was kept down. The methods mattered less.
If the Democrats get the chance, they will be even more ruthless next time.
They will then have allies in a Europe that is moving in an authoritarian direction.
That could get really ugly.
EU innleder prosess med sikte på å bannlyse partiet Europa av suverene nasjoner