Europe’s War on Democracy

This has been a bad year for European democracy. In the space of just 18 months, elections have been annulled, opposition leaders banned, and governments financially punished for carrying out the policies their voters chose.

Europe’s political elites have a knack for turning electoral processes into political theatre. When the establishment decides that the ‘wrong’ party is getting too popular, it isn’t shy about stepping in and correcting voters on their mistake. This is particularly clear in Germany, where the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), despite being the second most popular party in the Bundestag, has been battling against threats of a ban for years. 

From intelligence chiefs branding the AfD a “confirmed extremist” party, to cross-party motions openly exploring how to strip it of funding or outlaw it altogether, the idea of simply banning Germany’s main opposition is seen as a perfectly respectable talking point. Just a month ago, the federal president mused in a speech about whether democracy must defend itself by dissolving popular parties. 

Even if this is still mostly rhetoric at the national level, this experiment is already underway locally. By this September, a court had decided that residents of the city of Ludwigshafen in Rhineland-Palatinate should not be allowed to vote for an AfD candidate as mayor. Incumbent mayor Jutta Steinruck contacted the Rhineland-Palatinate Interior Ministry for information about the AfD mayoral candidate, Joachim Paul. The Social Democrat (SPD)-controlled ministry, which had also announced this year that it would ban civil servants who are AfD members from taking up state positions, duly obliged. The resulting report argued that Paul should be excluded from the mayoral ballot, due to his support for remigration, a photo on his Instagram taken with Austrian activist Martin Sellner, his reference to Lord of the Rings in an article he wrote, and his enjoyment of Wagner’s Nibelungenlied. This body of flimsy evidence was apparently enough for the city election committee—dominated by representatives of the SPD, Christian Union (CDU), Free Democratic Party (FDP), and a local independent group—to strike Paul from the ballot. This decision was then rubber-stamped by every court Paul appealed to, all the way up to the Federal Constitutional Court. Voters were instead given the same old, tired choices—a candidate from the CDU, one from the SPD, one independent (an SPD member), and one from the pro-EU group Volt. 

This sort of anti-democratic meddling is happening at the municipal level in Germany, but in France, it is aimed at the very top of national politics. In March, Marine Le Pen, leader of National Rally and the country’s main right-wing opposition figure, was handed a prison sentence, a €100,000 fine and, most politically explosive of all, a ban on holding public office for several years. This was the culmination of a long-running trial over her alleged misuse of EU parliamentary funds. Prosecutors argued that a number of people officially declared as ‘parliamentary assistants’ to Le Pen and other National Rally MEPs in Brussels were in fact working mainly or entirely for the party in France—doing campaigning, communications, and local political work—and were therefore improperly funded by the EU budget. Though against the law, this is not uncommon in the EU and is more often dealt with through repayments and administrative sanctions than through criminal trials carrying prison sentences. As it happens, Le Pen’s punishment conveniently bars her from standing in the 2027 presidential elections. 

This doesn’t stop at national governments. Increasingly, the European Union itself is stepping in when voters choose the ‘wrong’ policies. In June last year, the European Court of Justice hit Hungary with an unprecedented punishment for refusing to toe the EU line on immigration. It served Hungary a €200 million lump-sum fine, plus a further €1 million for every day it refuses to bring its asylum system into line with Brussels’s demands. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government stands accused of the crime of enforcing the borders in a way the Commission dislikes. Budapest is effectively being told that the migration policy voted for by Hungarians is illegitimate—and that unless it reverses course, the EU will keep turning the financial screws. As of April this year, total penalties linked to the case were estimated at over €500 million. 

Brussels has also proved that it has no qualms about interfering with member states’ elections. In November 2024, Romania’s presidential first round was won by Călin Georgescu, a previously marginal, staunchly anti-EU, pro-Russia outsider who surged to around 23% of the vote. Less than two weeks later, the Romanian Constitutional Court did something almost unheard of in Europe: it annulled the result, citing declassified intelligence about Russian cyber-attacks, undeclared campaign funds, and alleged manipulation of social media and AI tools in Georgescu’s favour. The second-round run-off was cancelled and pushed to May this year. 

In early March 2025, with polls again putting Georgescu comfortably ahead for the rescheduled May election, the Central Electoral Bureau struck him from the ballot. Prosecutors had by then opened a raft of investigations into him, including allegations of illicit campaign financing and “incitement against the constitutional order.” The electoral authority used the earlier annulment and these pending cases as grounds to reject his candidacy. Romania’s Constitutional Court then stepped in once more, this time to uphold his exclusion, definitively barring the frontrunner from standing in the re-run that he had been favoured to win. 

Formally, it was Romania’s own courts and election authority, not Brussels, that annulled the vote and then barred Georgescu from the rerun. But former EU commissioner Thierry Breton later boasted on French television: “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously do it if necessary in Germany”—a remark widely read as an admission that Brussels had helped engineer the outcome of the Romanian elections, and that the EU would be willing to do the same if the AfD came too close to power in Germany. 

Democracy in Europe is clearly in a dire state. Certainly, the EU won’t be the one to save it. Its so-called European Democracy Shield, first floated by European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen in 2024 and officially unveiled last month, is less about protecting democracy and more about protecting itself from democracy. The scheme is framed as cracking down on online misinformation and foreign interference, but will surely be used in practice to silence dissent. Any voices that push back against EU hegemony risk being accused of disseminating fake news, and any politician who stands up for national sovereignty can expect to be labelled a Chinese or Russian asset. We have seen so many times before that ‘democracy,’ as far as Brussels is concerned, is valuable only when it works towards the aims of the European project and its unelected guardians. 

Europe’s leaders are terrified of their own populations. The political elites do not believe people can be trusted to make decisions for themselves—certainly not ones so consequential as who should rule over them. Until voters make it clear that they will no longer tolerate being managed, censored, or overruled, many European nations will remain democracies in name only. Power will not be handed back politely, however. If Europeans still want a voice, they will have to raise it.