Aletho News

Cancel Culture has taken over European politics

Do we really want to outlaw the views of a third of the electorate?

Ashes of Pompeii | July 6, 2026

A few days ago, I wrote about the “banal nonentities” that form the political elite in Europe. Across Europe, these leaders of traditional establishment parties are deeply unpopular, most with approval ratings below 20%. Their policy platforms have demonstrably failed, leaving them destined to lose upcoming elections to supposedly “far right” parties. The great irony of this moment is that the policy platforms of these newly minted extremists would have been considered standard center right orthodoxy merely twenty years ago. Today, however, the media and the cultural elite have redrawn the boundaries of acceptable discourse, declaring these once mainstream views completely beyond the pale. Unable to defeat these parties at the ballot box through popular appeal, the establishment has turned to lawfare.

For the past decade or two, Anglo academic and intellectual spheres have been suffocated by the relentless machinery of cancel culture. What began as a tool for social enforcement in universities and media has now metastasized, erupting into the mainstream political arena of continental Europe. This phenomenon represents a profound shift in how political power is maintained. Where elections were once won through the clash of policies and the appeal of personalities, the modern political landscape is defined by institutional exclusion. Context, truth, logic, and tradition have been rendered entirely irrelevant, replaced by a singular and overriding imperative that one must belong to the approved in club.

And please, the point is not if the ideas of Farage or AfD are wrong. I might not agree with much of their platform. The problem is the courts should not be where electoral politics are decided. But the European political mainstream, irrelevant whether (supposedly) left or right, has failed miserably and are desperate.

This weaponization of the legal system is now the primary mechanism of political cancel culture in Europe. In the United Kingdom, Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform UK party which is poised to potentially win upcoming elections, is under intense investigation. He is accused of failing to declare financial support from his longtime assistant George Cottrell, including staff, security, and housing, before becoming a Member of Parliament. Furthermore, Farage faces scrutiny over an alleged undeclared gift of five million pounds from cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harbourn, threatening him with sanctions and disqualification. Reform UK maintains that no rules were violated, but the investigation itself serves the purpose of clouding their campaign.

Similar tactics are being deployed across the continent with alarming coordination. In France, the leading opposition candidates Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella are under relentless legal attack. Le Pen has already been disqualified from the elections due to a criminal case, while Bardella faces his own fraud investigation. Even mainstream rivals are not safe, as Dominique de Villepin and Édouard Philippe have become targets of the financial prosecutor for alleged historical offenses. This prosecutor reports to the Ministry of Justice, headed by Gérald Darmanin of President Emmanuel Macron’s party. What a coincidence, as this legal machinery conveniently protects Gabriel Attal, the virtual successor to Macron, by eliminating his prominent rivals.

In Germany, the state is actively trying to prevent the Alternative for Germany party from participating in elections. They are attempting to deprive the party of funding, and the domestic intelligence service has prepared a report labelling them anticonstitutional. At the European level, investigators are conducting coordinated searches and raids across multiple countries against right wing groups in the European Parliament, accusing them of large scale financial fraud and the theft of EU subsidies.

Does anyone doubt whether all of the parties use similar financial schemes? Of course not. And this without even going into the case of VdL and Pfizer…

The net is cast even wider in the Baltic states, where legal cases are routinely launched against opposition figures who attempt to gain votes from the large Russian diaspora. Lithuanian politician Antanas Kandrotas, along with Latvian Stability party leader Alexei Roslikov and his colleague Igor Yudin, have all been targeted by authorities. In every instance, the legal mechanism is utilized not to uphold justice, but to neutralize political threats.

This erosion of democratic norms is further evidenced by the outright cancelling of presidential elections in Romania and the glaring irregularities witnessed in Moldova. When the ballot box cannot be controlled, the information space is heavily policed. There is increasing and aggressive censorship on social media platforms, which are now acting as willing deputies for state control. Just this week, the European Union has criminalized the sharing of RT content. This draconian measure applies regardless of whether the shared content is true or false, and it completely ignores the intent of the user. Even if a citizen shares a link simply to cite it as an example of propaganda, they are still committing a criminal offense. The state is no longer just controlling the narrative through positive reinforcement of its own views, but through the active criminalization of alternative information.

When we bring the story of academic cancel culture together with these political prosecutions and media blackouts, a clear and disturbing picture emerges. The underlying philosophy is identical. In the intellectual world, cancel culture dictates that context, objective truth, logical argument, and historical tradition do not matter if the speaker holds the wrong ideological views. The only thing that matters is moral and ideological conformity to the prevailing orthodoxy. This exact same logic has now captured the European state. The establishment knows it can no longer win the argument on the merits of policy. Instead, they rely on the administrative and legal apparatus to silence the opposition. The allegations of financial impropriety or anticonstitutionalism are merely the new vocabulary of cancellation. The goal is to delegitimize the opposition and bar them from the democratic process entirely.

Ultimately, this trajectory should be deeply troubling, even for those who do not agree with some or even all of the policies of these right wing parties. By utilizing lawfare, election cancellations, and information blackouts, the establishment is effectively outlawing the views of up to forty percent of the population. Outlawing ideas does not make them disappear. These people and their underlying grievances will not simply go away because a court has ruled against them or a media conglomerate has banned their preferred platforms. When a significant portion of the electorate is told that their voices are invalid and their political representatives are criminals, the social contract begins to fracture. Some will inevitably start to look for where to go outside the current political system entirely, seeking alternative structures that the current elites can no longer control.

I think we have been down that road before and none of us should want a return visit.

July 6, 2026 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | European Union, Human rights, UK | Comments Off on Cancel Culture has taken over European politics