NATO’s Betrayal of Democracy: How Europe Silences Its Populist Right

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949 with a solemn pledge: NATO members would not only defend one another against external aggression, they would safeguard “the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” These words matter. They mean that NATO is not simply a military alliance, it is a union of democracies. Its credibility rests on the idea that members govern themselves with the very liberties they claim to defend. Yet in recent years, several NATO states have drifted from these commitments, especially when confronted with the rise of conservative populist movements. Rather than respecting voters’ choices and engaging in open debate, many governments have chosen censorship, bans, and prosecutions. These tactics may preserve establishment power in the short run, but they corrode democracy and contradict NATO’s founding principles.

Consider France. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Éric Zemmour’s movement have electrified French politics since 2016. Their rise has been met not with the rough-and-tumble of democratic contestation but with judicial harassment. Le Pen was prosecuted for tweeting images of ISIS atrocities, stripped of her parliamentary immunity, and even ordered to undergo a psychiatric exam. Though she was ultimately acquitted, the process itself conveyed a chilling message: criticize Islamist terror too sharply, and you may find yourself in court. In March 2025, a French court convicted Le Pen of embezzling EU funds and imposed a five-year political ban, ensuring she could not stand in 2027 unless her appeal succeeded. The verdict provoked bipartisan unease, with even centrist leaders warning against judges deciding which candidates voters may support. Zemmour, too, has endured multiple hate-speech convictions for comments on immigration and Islam. Critics may despise his rhetoric, but the prosecution of a presidential candidate for campaign statements is a dangerous precedent in a democracy. France has also dissolved right-wing groups like Génération Identitaire and enacted censorship laws empowering courts to remove “fake news” during elections. These measures are defended as protecting democracy, yet they undercut the very pluralism and free expression on which democracy depends.

Germany’s case is no less troubling. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has surged to become the country’s second party, at times topping national polls. In response, German authorities have unleashed censorship and surveillance. The 2018 NetzDG law forced platforms to delete “illegal” speech within 24 hours or face massive fines, leading to widespread over-censorship. AfD leaders have been investigated for tweets critical of Muslim immigration, their accounts suspended, and even criminal complaints filed for “incitement.” More serious still, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency placed the entire AfD under surveillance in 2021, treating the main opposition as a security threat. In 2025, the BfV escalated matters by officially designating AfD a “proven extremist organization,” enabling deeper spying and fueling calls for an outright ban. The government also banned Compact, a right-leaning magazine, raiding its offices and silencing its voice. Supporters of these actions argue that militant democracy requires restrictions to defend the constitutional order. Yet this logic threatens to collapse into authoritarianism, where the establishment alone decides who is fit to participate in politics. Even Friedrich Merz of the CDU warned that banning AfD would disenfranchise millions. NATO’s promise is not militant democracy, it is liberal democracy. A party with 20% of the electorate cannot be outlawed without abandoning the principle of free political choice.

The Netherlands offers further evidence of this pattern. Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom, has spent nearly a decade in courtrooms for his rhetoric. In 2016 he was convicted of inciting discrimination for asking supporters if they wanted “fewer Moroccans.” Judges later upheld the conviction in 2020, a remarkable fact: a politician was found guilty of a crime for repeating the desires of his own supporters. Thierry Baudet, leader of Forum for Democracy, has likewise faced judicial censorship, ordered to delete tweets comparing COVID restrictions to the Holocaust and barred from making such analogies in the future. In 2023, Baudet’s party was suspended from parliamentary debates for a week, silencing an elected faction. In 2024, Dutch prosecutors deemed FvD campaign ads to be criminal hate speech and summoned party leaders as suspects. These are not marginal figures, they are leaders of parties that regularly win millions of votes. When courts censor their campaign speech and parliaments suspend their voices, the line between democracy and repression grows perilously thin.

Romania provides perhaps the starkest case. In November 2024, nationalist candidate Călin Georgescu shocked elites by winning the first round of the presidential election. Days later, the Constitutional Court annulled the results, citing alleged Russian disinformation on TikTok. No direct evidence was provided. The annulment marked the first time in post-Cold War Europe that an election outcome was nullified. Georgescu was barred from running again, as was another nationalist contender, Diana Șoșoacă, who had earlier been excluded for making statements “contrary to democratic values.” Authorities also raided Georgescu’s associates, indicted him for “promoting fascist leaders,” and pushed through new speech laws against “extremist propaganda.” Tens of thousands of Romanians protested, chanting for free elections. Vice President J.D. Vance condemned the annulment as flimsy and undemocratic, while Elon Musk called it “a direct blow to the heart of democracy.” Whether one agrees with Georgescu’s politics or not, denying voters the ability to choose him betrays the essence of self-government.

Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, demonstrates how deep this erosion can go. After the failed coup of July 2016, President Erdoğan used emergency powers to close media outlets, jail journalists, and purge opposition parties. Conservative figures such as Meral Akşener of the İYİ Party have faced violent intimidation, including bullets fired into party headquarters. The pro-Kurdish HDP faces dissolution, with thousands of its members arrested. Erdoğan’s opponents are frequently prosecuted for “insulting the president.” Turkey has become a cautionary tale: once a flawed but functioning democracy, it now rules by fear and decree, in open defiance of NATO’s stated values.

What ties these cases together is a pattern. As populist conservatives gain strength, establishment parties respond with censorship, bans, and prosecutions. Leaders justify these measures as protecting democracy, yet the result is to deny voters the right to choose. This is not hypothetical. In France, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, and Turkey, opposition leaders have been put on trial, stripped of office, or barred from elections. NATO’s charter does not permit such shortcuts. Article 2 commits members to “strengthen their free institutions” and “promote conditions of stability and well-being.” Free institutions require that voters decide which parties rise or fall, not courts, intelligence agencies, or ruling parties.

Some may object that NATO has no mechanism to police domestic governance. This is true. Yet the alliance’s legitimacy is based on the claim that it is an alliance of democracies. If its members behave like authoritarian regimes at home, that legitimacy collapses. How can NATO lecture others on free elections if its own members annul them? How can it condemn censorship in Russia or China when its leaders jail journalists or ban opposition parties? A double standard corrodes moral authority, and without moral authority, NATO risks becoming a hollow shell, a military pact without democratic meaning.

The US has begun to raise its voice. Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized Germany’s surveillance of AfD as “tyranny in disguise.” Vice President Vance denounced Romania’s annulled election. Elon Musk warned that banning AfD would be an “extreme attack on democracy.” These interventions matter. They remind European allies that NATO’s credibility rests not only on tanks and treaties but on democracy itself. American taxpayers have poured billions into NATO. They have a right to insist that their allies honor the commitments that justify that expense. Defending free speech at home is as important as deterring threats abroad.

NATO’s founding treaty was right: democracy, liberty, and the rule of law are the alliance’s common heritage. But they are fragile. They cannot survive if members twist them into tools of repression. The populist right may be disruptive, it may be controversial, but it is a legitimate expression of voters’ will. To silence it with bans and prosecutions is to betray NATO’s promise. If NATO members wish to lead the free world, they must first practice freedom at home.

Yet NATO nations and communist China get the trade agreements while Russia and India get the sanctions and tariffs.
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Patience, wait till this Ukie war wraps up. We will be opening up Trade and Commerce again….Russia has much of what the West needs, and many will rush into what’s left of Ukraine to grab resources ( which Vlad will control much of)

https://x.com/ArmchairW/status/1961296644017705164

“A dark theory for the evening. Let’s talk about Russian strategy in Ukraine.⬇️

Looking at developments lately, specifically: (1) the Ukrainian casualty leak showing an astronomical 1.7M KIA/MIA; and (2) the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk - I thought should revisit a dark thought I had a while ago, namely that, “maybe the killing itself is the point of all of this.”

I’ve said before that the Russians have fought an extraordinarily clean war in Ukraine, but it should be understood that there is a very legalistic shade on that assessment. They’ve killed very few civilians, and Ukrainian propagandists are perpetually beclowning themselves trying to pretend that the usual single-digit handful of injured civilians that accompany the latest attack using hundreds of standoff weapons fired into city centers (producing secondary explosions visible from outer space as military targets hidden among civilian infrastructure are destroyed with surgical precision) somehow constitute gEnOCiDe rather than some of the most well-controlled warfighting in the history of the business. There is another and far darker side to Russia’s “clean” war, however.

Let us consider the fate of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - legal combatants all, whom the Russians can and do target and kill without limit. I mentioned the casualty leak earlier, but I feel this needs to have a line drawn under it - one point seven million personnel killed or missing in action in the AFU, over the course of the war. 1.7 MILLION. Seven or eight percent of Ukraine’s prewar population, probably something like a quarter of the entire national cohort of military-aged males, dead or missing. Casualties on the scale of a genocide, sufficient to permanently cripple any postwar Ukrainian nation. Casualties multiple times that which I assessed two years ago as sufficient to shatter the AFU based on the experience of Nazi Germany.

This brings me to the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk two weeks ago, in which a run-of-the-mill Russian attack walked through twenty kilometers of Ukrainian defensive belts and into open country. The Ukrainian propagandists coped by whining about how the single most important front sector for the AFU had somehow “run out of infantry.” But did the Russians throw in a mobile reserve to collapse the front and chase the AFU back to the Dniper, despite doubtless knowing full well what was going on? No, they did not - they consolidated in the breach and awaited the inevitable, panicked Ukrainian counterattack, in which they would have the opportunity to destroy Ukraine’s remaining elite troops.

Which brings me to my conclusion. The Russians have had countless opportunities to make large advances in this war, especially recently - the Ukrainian front line is an absolute shambles and their “drone wall” tactic will falter against any serious attack. So ineffectual is the AFU that very few Russian moves at the front even face serious opposition these days, with most geolocations of Russian advances showing them already established in place and dealing with harassment by kill drones after having seized positions bloodlessly. The Russians have in fact consistently foregone breaking the front and taking swathes of ground in favor of killing the largest possible number of Ukrainian soldiers on the existing front line under the existing attritional combat dynamic.

This “tactical directive” held true even during the Battle of Sudzha-Korenevo, fought in prewar Russia. Rather than counterattacking aggressively to evict the AFU, the Russians saw the opportunity to kill gigantic numbers of Ukrainians in a trap the enemy wouldn’t be able to extract themselves from for ideological reasons, and they took it. That battle ended up being nine months of hideously lopsided butchery that broke the back of the AFU.

All of this makes observing the war more than a little maddening, but it’s a consistent pattern of behavior that begs for explanation. So here’s my theory.

The Russian government has consistently sought to end the war via peace treaty with the existing Ukrainian government, not via regime change, outright conquest, or even killing enough of that government to find a more flexible interlocutor among the Maidanites. Putin apparently wants a treaty with Zelensky. The Russians have also consistently made demands of the Ukrainian government - and its NATO sponsors - that are absolute political nonstarters for the Maidan-era regime and which that regime, by its very nature, simply cannot accept. Russian language rights, Orthodox religious rights, demilitarization, large territorial concessions which would see the AFU surrender vast urban areas without a shot fired. And yet the Russians insist, and they’re going to continue killing Ukrainian soldiers at ever-more lopsided ratios until they get their way.

Which leads me to the brutal conclusion: Putin doesn’t want to see Ukraine conquered. He’s never publicly expressed any desire for that. The consistent Russian policy is instead to see Ukraine - a “free” and “independent” Ukraine, having come to this impasse of its own sovereign will - utterly humiliated. Putin wants to make Zelensky put on a suit, come groveling to the Kremlin, and sign a treaty that will see the Maidanite government surrender its arms, disgorge huge amounts of territory, and reverse every single anti-Russian policy position it ever had. Ukrainian nationalism will be discredited overnight by the hands of those very nationalists, and the economically irrelevant, demographically shattered rump state will be sucked back into Russia’s political orbit in a matter of days.

So of course the Russians are only advancing in the most leisurely way possible. Their goal is to place the Ukrainian government into a militarily untenable situation so as to force a flamboyantly humiliating peace treaty upon them that includes large territorial concessions beyond the line of control - the ultimate Ukrainian taboo - so as to discredit Ukrainian nationalism by the hands of the very ultranationalists who took their nation to war in the first place.“

NATO has become a “progressive” and expansionist superstate, as one sees the hypocrisy of “silencing the populist right.”

"Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our times. It is a threat multiplier that impacts Allied security, both in the Euro-Atlantic area and in the Alliance's broader neighbourhood." NATO Climate Change and Security Action Plan NATIO, 14 June 2021
Environment, climate change and security NATO, 18 July 2024
"...the importance of incorporating gender perspectives in all that the Alliance does....:
Women, Peace and Security NATO, 31 October 2024
"NATO and its partners in the region share common values and a goal of working together to uphold the rules-based international order."
Relations with partners in the Indo-Pacific region NATO, 23 June 2025

All the above are NATO links. Who decides the rules in the "the rules-based international order?"

How many "gender perspectives" is NATO recognizing?

How is NATO going to "fight" climate change? With what weapons or military alliances?

But notice, in that visit and meeting with President Trump last week, European "leaders" included not just national leaders, but the leader of the EU -- itself a superstate -- and NATO, as if the United States was not a part of NATO, Rutte being somehow a lobbyist for some other entity?

--- "Russian propaganda."

Everywhere one looks.... Here's some additional "Russian propaganda" for discussion and debate.

"The EU will gradually and effectively stop the import of Russian gas and oil by the end of 2027, under a legislative proposal put forward by the European Commission today. "
Commission proposes gradual phase-out of Russian gas and oil imports into the EU European Commisson, 16 June 2025.
"These are the areas where economic ties with Russia remain the strongest, for the US and Europe respectively."
The US and Europe are still doing billions of dollars’ worth of business with Russia despite years of war CNN, 14 August 2025.

As to the source of "Russian propaganda" on X --

Armchair Warlord
@ArmchairW
Weaboo, author and battle theorist. Interactions are not endorsements.
United States
Joined March 2014

In March this American "Russian propagandist" wrote in part, "Turns out all the economic benefits from neoliberal 'free' trade were actually going to middlemen."

An interesting assertion. Middlemen everywhere will not be pleased.

As Smedley Butler, United States Marine Corps major general and two-time Medal of Honor recipient, wrote, "war is a racket." For all concerned.

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