Germany’s thin-skinned Green tyrant

Robert Habeck, Germany’s vice-chancellor and economy and climate minister, has had a rough few months. His attempts to slow the country’s economic decline, and to simultaneously bring it closer to Net Zero, have failed. His popularity plummeted when he attempted to impose an abrupt ban on gas heaters. To make matters worse, earlier this month, his ministry was forced to admit that Germany is heading for a 0.2 per cent economic contraction.

Rather than showing humility in the face of these failures, Habeck is attempting to silence his critics. Earlier this year, it was revealed that he had filed 730 (mostly online) hate-crime complaints since last April. He has tried to present this as a fight for the broader public good. ‘Hate’, he argues, is ‘poisoning the political discourse. It is intended to intimidate and to create an atmosphere of fear.’ Apparently, he is nobly going into battle against ‘a world of hate’ to prevent ‘brutality’ from ‘becoming the norm’.

Habeck is clearly being disingenuous here. After all, it’s only the insults that are directed at him, and other members of the establishment, that seem to concern him. The legal proceedings he has initiated do not include anything directed at his political opponents.

A report aired by one of Germany’s public broadcasters, ZDF, quotes some of the ‘hate speech’ in question. It includes, among more serious threats, people referring to Habeck as a ‘dumb goose’ and his Green Party comrades as ‘green rats’. One post called him a ‘paedophile children’s author’ (an allusion to the fact that Habeck once wrote children’s books with his wife).

The fact that Habeck feels he can get away with going after hundreds of citizens, just because they say unpleasant things about him, shows the extent to which free speech has come under attack in Germany. Formally, Germany’s Basic Law protects people’s rights to ‘freely express and disseminate their opinions’. Yet the idea that there should be limits on this has become deeply entrenched in establishment circles – particularly as populist parties like the AfD and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht have started threatening the governing coalition in recent local elections.

This is why Habeck’s crackdown on criticism has been met with sympathy and support in the mainstream media. ‘It is right to clamp down hard on hate-speech incidents’, writes the Süddeutsche newspaper. ‘They are a danger to democracy.’ Even Die Welt, which first reported on Habeck’s many hate-speech charges, has printed a commentary arguing that ‘there is no right to cause offence’.

Those outside of the establishment, meanwhile, have seen Habeck’s attempts to use the power of the state to silence his critics for what they really are: outrageous assaults on free speech and democracy. This is particularly obvious when one looks at some of the ridiculous hate-speech cases that have managed to come to court. Back in May, a pensioner was fined €7,800 for calling Habeck a ‘complete idiot’ (‘Vollidiot’) on Facebook.

A few months earlier, in January, a 59-year old was acquitted of a similar charge by a court in Hamburg. The defendant had written on X that it was time to ‘finally throw this complete idiot [ie, Habeck] out’. Thankfully, the public prosecutor’s office dropped the case on account of it being so trivial. But even unsuccessful prosecutions will make Germans think twice before voicing criticism. The threat is all too clear: call Habeck a nasty name and you may face legal consequences.

These are the actions of a desperate, failing politician. Each and every prosecution is a direct attack on citizens’ right to express their dissatisfaction with an increasingly hapless government. For any German committed to free speech, opposing these top-down intimidation tactics is a democratic imperative.

Sabine Beppler-Spahl is spiked’s Germany correspondent.