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His comments, a week before Germany’s elections, seemed to specifically target efforts to sideline the hard-right Alternative for Germany.
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Vance Lectures Europe on Democracy at Security Meeting
Vice President JD Vance criticized European governments at the Munich Security Conference on Friday, saying that they are failing to uphold democratic values and are exercising extreme censorship.
While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine. And we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense. The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within. Shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course, that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for? And I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges. But the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis, I believe, we all face together, is one of our own making. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.
- Feb. 14, 2025Updated 3:01 p.m. ET
Vice President JD Vance told European leaders on Friday that their biggest security threat was not military aggression from Russia or China, or election meddling from Moscow. Rather, he said, it was what he called “the enemy within” — their own suppression of abortion protests and other forms of free speech and the sidelining of parties considered extremist.
The address stunned and silenced hundreds of attendees at the Munich Security Conference, a forum where top-level politicians, diplomats and analysts had gathered expecting to hear the Trump administration’s plans for ending the war in Ukraine and Europe’s defenseagainst a rising Russian threat in the future.
Instead, the vice president offered what may be a preview of a new kind of trans-Atlantic relationship under Mr. Trump — one not built on postwar bonds of stability between allied governments, but rather on ties between once-fringe political parties that share a common approach to migration, identity and internet speech.
Mr. Vance singled out his German hosts, who will elect a new chancellor next weekend, and told them to drop their objections to working with a party that has often reveled in banned Nazi slogans and has been shunned from government as a result.
It was an extraordinary intervention in the domestic politics of a democratic American ally, and it brought some gasps in the hall.
He did not mention the party, the Alternative for Germany or AfD, by name but made a direct reference to the longstanding agreement by mainstream German politicians to freeze out the group, parts of which have been formally classified as extremist by German intelligence.
