Germany's dystopian free speech crisis

Max Thompson, Campaigns Officer

22 July 2026

Berlin is threatening thousands of German citizens with fines and even imprisonment for criticising politicians online. Cases that would be dismissed as trivial in most democracies — a meme, a nickname, an unflattering comparison — are being pursued by police and prosecutors under laws that have turned ordinary political commentary into a criminal offence. This is not normal in a purported Western liberal democracy.

Dr Rainer Zitelmann, a German historian and author of more than thirty books, is one of thousands of Germans who have been threatened with fines or imprisonment for social media posts that fall foul of the country's uniquely stringent political speech laws. When a letter arrived from Berlin police, he assumed it was a misunderstanding. It was not. He was accused of violating a post-Second World War law banning the display of Nazi symbols, slogans, and imagery — an offence that carries a prison sentence of up to three years.

The sixty-nine-year-old, who has spent much of his career studying Hitler and National Socialism, discovered he was under investigation after resharing a meme that criticised Hitler by comparing his invasion of Czechoslovakia to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. It was not the comparison that triggered the investigation, but the fact that the image showed Hitler wearing a swastika armband. The police ignored the fact that it was clearly painting the Nazi dictator and war-mongering Russian president in a negative light.

The provision in question, Section 86a of the German Criminal Code, was introduced to prevent neo-Nazis marching through German streets with swastika flags and Hitler salutes. But it has now expanded. Investigations under it have more than doubled over the past decade, according to official police statistics, and Dr Zitelmann is not the only academic or commentator to have been caught by it: the media theorist Norbert Bolz and the journalist Jan Fleischhauer have faced similar scrutiny, despite being, in Dr Zitelmann's words, "clearly democrats and opponents of extremism."

Dr Zitelmann is now calling for Section 86a to be abolished — not because of his own experience, but because he believes the law has simply pushed Germany's estimated fifty thousand neo-Nazis underground rather than confronting them.

"The only way forward is to abolish these kinds of laws. I do not want them to do this in secret: I want to see my enemy."

He has also pointed to the network of state-backed "Meldestellen", or reporting centres, that allow citizens to report one another for comments deemed offensive — a mechanism he has compared to the informant culture of East Germany's Stasi.

"It is the stuff of totalitarian countries."

If Section 86a has ensnared historians for criticising fascism, Section 188 of the German Criminal Code has proven even more sinister. The provision, which dates back to the Weimar Republic, imposes a de facto ban on publicly insulting or defaming elected officials. It was strengthened in 2021, lowering the threshold for prosecution in response to a genuine wave of violent threats against politicians — but it has since been used to pursue citizens for little more than mockery. It clearly does not reflect the realities of the social media age and the increased use of social media for open political debate.

One pensioner was investigated after posting "Pinocchio is coming" on Facebook, in reference to Chancellor Friedrich Merz visiting his hometown; the case was dropped only after public outcry. Another German had his home raided for calling a government minister a "Schwachkopf" — a dummy. A further individual was fined two thousand euro, around one thousand seven hundred pounds, for calling the chancellor a "lying Fritz."

Official figures show a record four thousand seven hundred and ninety-two Section 188 cases recorded in Germany in 2025, a rise of nearly eighty-five per cent since 2023.

The scale of enforcement has drawn scrutiny well beyond Germany's borders. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, Irene Khan, conducted an official visit to Germany in early 2026 and subsequently warned that the space for free expression in the country was shrinking amid growing threats — a degree of international scrutiny more commonly associated with authoritarian states than with a major European democracy.

Free speech campaigners from both the Left and the Right have raised concerns, as have members of the Trump administration. The point was made explicitly by US Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference in 2025, who drew a direct line between the erosion of free expression in Germany and comparable pressures in other Western democracies, including the United Kingdom. There are, indeed, striking parallels between the debate now unfolding in Germany and the position in Britain, where citizens are increasingly finding themselves questioned by police over opinions expressed online.

Germany's security services have faced separate criticism after the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the country's domestic intelligence agency, classified the Alternative for Germany (AfD) — the second-largest party in the Bundestag — as an extremist organisation, a decision the AfD is now challenging in court. It has also been reported that the BfV has begun compiling files on German activists with links to the Trump administration, further deepening concerns about the politicisation of the state's surveillance powers.

These cases might initially read as isolated absurdities: a pensioner's raided home, a fine for a nickname, a meme investigated as though it were genuine Nazi propaganda. Taken together, they describe a pattern in which laws designed to protect democracy from its enemies are being turned against ordinary citizens engaged in perfectly legitimate political speech.

Germany's experience should be a lesson for other countries and their respective governments. It is a reminder that speech laws drafted with the best of intentions — to prevent a return to fascism, to protect politicians from genuine harassment — can, without firm safeguards, be distorted and become instruments of routine political policing. As Dr Zitelmann's case shows, even a historian who has devoted his career to studying the dangers of totalitarianism is not immune from being investigated under laws that increasingly resemble the very thing they were built to prevent.

Read more in The Telegraph.