Old fights between Americans and Europeans used to pit conservatives on this side against Euro-socialists over there. Not this time. Look behind the scenes at the latest trans-Atlantic skirmish, and you will find among the main protagonists many in Europe’s center-right.
This scuffle across the ocean has been long in coming, but it was precipitated last week by two events. On Thursday at 10 pm, the Trump administration published the National Security Strategy of the United States, one that put Europe in the crosshairs. The following day, the European Union fined Elon Musk‘s X $140 million for supposed violations of its Digital Services Act.
In both cases, the center-right plays the key roles. This responds to an internal European dynamic, proving once again that the late Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, was right when he said that “all politics is local.”
What is happening is a political fight for power in Europe. On one side is the old center-right, a conservative order that has been at best asleep at the wheel for decades on numerous issues, from immigration to cultural capture by the Left, to gender ideology, and is therefore suddenly facing a rebellion by the electorate.
This political demand by the public has created a crop of dissident parties on the Right that the media disdains as populist or “far-right.” The public is not fooled by the labels, and these parties are surging, taking votes mostly from the center-right.
This division is, to a small degree, replicated stateside. Our RINOS, the Republicans who never accepted President Donald Trump, are aligning with the euro-RINOS. In other words, the trans-Atlantic kerfuffle is actually two real fights for power — one over there and one over here.
The fight over here has been pretty much settled. Trump and his MAGA movement have taken over the Republican Party, at least for now, and either Vice President JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio would extend that into the future if they were to win the presidency in 2028.
Not so in Europe, where the game is far from over. Chega in Portugal, Vox in Spain, National Rally in France, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, the Freedom Party in Austria, Reform in the United Kingdom, etc., are Trumpy alternatives that keep growing in strength but continue to compete for votes with the older and established center-right.
That old conservative establishment, long in the tooth but short on solutions, is composed of the German CDU/CSU, the Partido Popular in Spain, Les Républicains in France, and others. Each has some good, capable people who understand that coalitions are needed to govern, but the party leadership prefers to throw a cordon sanitaire, or sanitary belt, around the new Right, and in some cases refuses to form coalitions.
This is why the EU Commission needs censorship and resorts to the DSA.
The DSA has been compared to Britain’s Stamp Act of 1765, which levied a tax on printed materials and was one of the acts that convinced colonists to break bonds with England. With good reason: It would make the EU’s bureaucrats the global online speech police.
The ostensible reason the EU justifies these actions is, of course, to create a “safe” online environment by fighting odious “hate speech” and “misinformation.”
But these malleable terms are putty in the hands of petty bureaucratic tyrants. The old guard clearly aims to use the DSA to stop the new parties from using the digital platforms, especially X, to circumvent the cordon sanitaire imposed on them by the old guard’s allies in the media.
The DSA, explains Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Alexandra Harrison Gaiser, is a “digital censorship framework that gives an unaccountable bureaucracy sweeping powers to silence speech around the world. The EU does this by essentially outsourcing content moderation duties to digital platforms by threatening them with crippling fines.”
Under the DSA, Gaiser goes on, “the EU will fine private global companies that operate right here in the U.S.—think Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X—up to percent of their global annual turnover every time they don’t censor certain speech.”
With X, the commission found that the platform’s paid verification blue checkmark “misleads” users about authenticity, that X failed to maintain a sufficient “searchable, accessible ad library” that helps it detect undue influence, and that X obstructed access to public platform data, limiting scrutiny of hate speech.
These do seem like excuses to cripple X’s freedom in Europe. And the old center-right’s fingerprints are all over this. The head of the commission is Ursula von der Leyen, and the head of the EPP bloc reuniting the center-right’s parties in the EU is Manfred Weber — both CDU politicians.
Some of the biggest cheers for the commission have come from such center-right figures as Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister Radek Sikorski, Esteban Gonzalez Pons from Spain’s PP, and other center-right politicians in Denmark, Austria, and throughout Europe.
The national security strategy that preceded von der Leyen’s fines was, in retrospect, clairvoyant: The United States, it said, “will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.”
WHAT TRUMP’S SECURITY STRATEGY MEANS FOR EUROPE
“The larger issues facing Europe,” the strategy said, “include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”
The reaction in Europe by the old Right has been to circle the wagons.
On Saturday, one of our most capable officials, Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau, asked on X why our most stalwart NATO allies turn into ferocious anti-Americans when they “wear their EU hats?” Clearly, because they cease to be statesmen and become politicos fighting for turf.
