On a sunny day this past summer, I was strolling through Karlsruhe, a provincial German town where Germany’s Constitutional Court sits, when I happened upon a peaceful demonstration demanding freedom of the press. A casually dressed youth with a megaphone was exhorting spectators to resist threats to freedom and democracy. A hippie in a white blouse and flowing floral trousers held a sign caricaturing Germany’s legacy media as “the real fake news.” A 20-something lass with pink hair and black-strapped shoes raised a placard declaring “Without freedom of the press, democracy is bankrupt.” Another banner proclaimed “Freedom of the Press” above dates noting that noble concept’s birth in modern Germany—May 23, 1949, the day the Federal Republic, or West Germany, was founded—and its putative death—July 16, 2024, the recent day when Germany’s interior minister banned a political magazine.

Thus did I come into contact with what the German government now considers the “far right.” Despite the activists’ styles and slogans, they were not liberal idealists protesting conservative censorship, but right-wing dissidents protesting their leftist government’s decision to shutter Compact, a magazine that supports the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD) party. In June, AfD placed second in Germany’s elections to the European Union Parliament after running on an anti-illegal migration platform. According to Nancy Faeser, the socialist interior minister responsible for the ban, Compact, which boasts 40,000 subscribers and reaches many more through online media engagement, is a publication of “intellectual arsonists who incite a climate of hatred and violence against refugees and migrants and seek to overthrow our democratic state.”

Faeser’s ban on Compact was no mere administrative sanction. Rooting her decision in a German law that broadly forbids political activism opposing the country’s constitutional order, she dispatched 339 police officers to raid 14 locations, including Compact’s offices, the offices of its parent company, and the homes of its staff and shareholders. The police seized technical equipment, office furniture, vehicles, merchandise, liquid assets, and just about anything else they could physically take, as well as bank accounts. Compact’s video production subsidiary was also closed. The magazine’s websites were blocked, and its social media accounts were contacted with an eye toward forcing them to shut down. Germany’s Federal Administrative Court later suspended the ban pending the results of a full investigation, but Compact’s ultimate fate remains unknown and will be decided in a legal battle between a relatively small publication and a national government with practically unlimited resources.

Tension between free speech rights and the European administrative state has exploded in recent years, particularly with the expansion of social media, nontraditional news sources, and transnational conduits of information. While neither the EU nor any of its 27 member states recognizes freedom of speech and expression with the same breadth that U.S. courts have found in the First Amendment, both the supranational body and its constituent parts nominally accord the concept protection as a fundamental human right. Without a robust, precedent-based legal system, however, Europe is struggling to decide where to draw the line. Naturally, those in power—generally statist bureaucrats relying on the center left’s entrenched hegemony in EU institutions and many national governments—are increasingly setting limits to protect themselves and their values at the expense of those who disagree or merely assert the freedom to express themselves. As the Compact case shows, it was the state’s prerogative to decide when “purposes of state” superseded the right of free expression.