Vance Tells Europeans to Stop Shunning Parties Deemed Extreme

Vice President JD Vance told European leaders on Friday that their biggest security threat was not military aggression from Russia or China, but their own suppression of free speech — including efforts to block hard-right parties from joining governments.

An audience that was largely expecting Mr. Vance to lay out the Trump administration’s priorities for the trans-Atlantic alliance, NATO military spending and negotiations with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine, instead received a lecture on what Mr. Vance described as the continent’s own failures in living up to democratic ideals.

Those failures, Mr. Vance said, included efforts to restrict so-called “misinformation” and other content on social media and laws against abortion protests that he said unfairly silenced Christians.

Perhaps most strikingly, the vice president called on Europeans to drop their opposition to working with anti-immigration parties, calling them a legitimate expression of the will of voters angered by high levels of migration over the last decade. Those parties include the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, parts of which have been classified as extremist by German intelligence.

All other parties in Germany refuse to join with the AfD in forming governments, an effort known as a “firewall” against extremism in a country where memories of the Nazis still dominate its political culture.