There will always be politicians who hold views that some voters find distasteful. That's democracy. But Europe comes perilously close to undermining it by censoring, suppressing or outright banning political groups considered beyond the pale in polite company. Unless a politician is committing a crime, you'd think he'd be free to go about his business.
Not at the European Parliament. There, a few usual suspects, including France's Jean-Marie Le Pen and Italy's Alessandra Mussolini (yes, she's a member of that family), just formed a "far right" political bloc. "Gypsie-haters, Holocaust deniers, xenophobes, homophobes, anti-Semites," roared the Independent on Monday in reporting on the new "Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty" group.
Rather than fight them on ideas -- which ought not be difficult in this case -- the Parliament's largest center-left grouping, the Socialists, is pushing a boycott. Their leader in Parliament, Martin Schulz, wants to prevent members of the new bloc from taking committee vice chairmanships, jobs that normally are distributed in proportion to size of the group, by using a hitherto unpoliticized procedural vote on appointments.
He also questions whether the parliamentarians who have joined up with "Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty" really have a common platform, a precondition for forming a group and getting public funding. Wait, so if they're not a monolithic bloc, then what's the problem exactly?
Mr. Schulz's real gripe, which no amount of procedural shenanigans can address, is with the concept of free elections. However odious he considers the views they espouse, the new bloc's members are the legal representatives of people in democracies from Austria to Bulgaria. If the Parliament wants to put a cordon sanitaire around politicians who utter xenophobic views with the argument that doing so might have stopped Hitler, then why not put one around Mr. Schulz's own group on the grounds that it's historically linked to Stalin and Mao's murder of tens of millions in the name of leftist Utopia?
Given the Continent's dark experience with fascism, attempts to ban neo-Nazi parties or hate speech is emotionally understandable. So it takes enlightened and wise political leadership -- not in surplus anywhere -- to see that such restrictions do little good and can do much harm. They dilute freedom for everyone and carry the danger of making heroes of demagogues.
In the same vein, Germany's recent push to export its strict anti-Nazi laws is not welcome news. Having just taken over the EU's rotating presidency, Berlin says one of its priorities is to make Holocaust denial a crime throughout the bloc. But criminalizing their expression won't make the beliefs disappear. It also runs the risk of turning Nazi apologists into martyrs. British historian David Irving, imprisoned on the basis of similar laws in Austria and just released, won a huge audience for his political views only after his incarceration.
The rationale for the German initiative is worrying. "We believe that there are limits to freedom of expression," German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries said Monday, "and the limits are there when it is offensive to other religions and ethnic groups." It doesn't take much imagination to see where such thinking leads. Several European politicians and writers already live under police protection for offending radical Muslims. By the logic of the Holocaust-denial legislation, jihadists have every right to try to codify their religious/political sensitivities in European law.
Limits to free speech are generally drawn at the point at which words incite violence. Thus, parties linked to terrorist groups are banned. Denial of the Holocaust and the Le Pen-Mussolini form of national prejudice are ignorant, malicious, hateful and politically opportunistic. But in a free country, none of that is a crime.
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