Berlin, Feb 15: Top German officials pushed back hard against US Vice President JD Vance’s complaints Friday about the state of democracy in Europe, with the defence minister saying nine days before his country’s election that it is “unacceptable” to draw a parallel with authoritarian governments.He and Chancellor Olaf Scholz defended German mainstream parties’ “firewall” against a far-right party following criticism from the vice president.
Vance lectured European governments about free speech in an appearance at the Munich Security Conference on Friday, saying that he fears it is “in retreat” across the continent.
“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.
German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, speaking a couple of hours later, said he couldn’t let the speech go without comment.
“If I understood him correctly, he is comparing conditions in parts of Europe with those in authoritarian regimes,” Pistorius said. “That is unacceptable, and it is not the Europe and not the democracy in which I live and am currently campaigning.”
Vance also told European leaders that “if you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.” He said that no democracy could survive telling millions of voters that their concerns “are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.”
“Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters,” he said. “There’s no room for firewalls.”
Vance didn’t elaborate on that. But mainstream parties in Germany say they won’t work with the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party, or AfD. That stance is often referred to as a “firewall.”
Polls have put AfD in second place ahead of a national election on Feb. 23 with about 20 per cent support.
Pistorius countered that “every opinion has a voice in this democracy. It makes it possible for partly extremist parties like AfD to campaign completely normally, just like every other party.”
He noted that AfD’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, was on prime-time German television on Thursday night along with the other contenders.
But he added that “democracy doesn’t mean that the loud minority is automatically right,” and that “democracy must be able to defend itself against the extremists who want to destroy it.”
Scholz took to social network X to “emphatically reject” Vance’s comments.
“Out of the experiences of Nazism, the democratic parties in Germany have a joint consensus — that is the firewall against extreme right-wing parties,” he wrote.
Bavarian governor Markus Söder — a prominent figure in Germany’s centre-right opposition bloc, which leads pre-election polls — told reporters that “we take every opinion seriously, but we decide ourselves with whom we form a coalition,” German news agency dpa reported.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre took issue with how Vance urged European officials to stem irregular migration in Friday’s speech. Vance said the European electorate didn’t vote to open “floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.”