United States Vice President JD Vance has taken aim at European countries during his first international trip, accusing leaders of rollbacks on free speech, lax migration policies and delinquency in their defence commitments.
In a speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Friday, Vance announced that the administration of President Donald Trump would mark a pivot in terms of the US relationship with its European allies.
“There is a new sheriff in town under Donald Trump’s leadership,” Vance told an audience of political leaders, military officers and diplomats at the annual conference.
He proceeded to accuse European leaders of censoring social media, interfering in elections and violating the rights of Christians.
“I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or, worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing,” Vance said. “In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.”
Vance’s remarks garnered a swift rebuke from some officials. Speaking shortly afterwards, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said he could not let Vance’s claims go unanswered.
“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.”
What did Vance say?
Multiple countries received jabs and swipes in Vance’s first major international speech.
The US vice president, for example, singled out Romania for cancelling its elections in December over alleged Russian meddling and condemned Sweden for convicting an activist of a hate crime for staging public burnings of the Quran.
He also accused the United Kingdom of backsliding on religious rights for its arrest of an activist who refused to leave a protected area outside an abortion clinic.
When it came to the conference’s host country, Germany, Vance criticised a consensus among mainstream political parties not to work with the far-right, anti-immigration group Alternative for Germany (AfD). That policy of political isolation has been dubbed a “firewall”.
“Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls,” Vance said.
He added that such policies prevent dialogue and broadly accused European leaders of working to silence the voices of those they disagreed with.
“Now, 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,” Vance said.
In his response, Pistorius, the German defence minister, noted that the AfD has been able to campaign and spread its messages just like any other p