Barely six months after Giorgia Meloni’s government was sworn in, the chief executive of Italy’s public broadcaster Rai resigned. Carlo Fuortes cited “a political conflict” as the reason for his departure in May 2023, a year before the end of his term.
The top posts quickly went to nominees with ties to Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party with neofascist roots. Rai’s CEO is now Giampaolo Rossi, a former Rai board member who has in the past voiced support for Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump.
“They want to take control of Rai and change the narrative to their way of thinking,” a senior Rai insider said at the time. Another said every new government made management changes but the difference with this one was it was “ruthless”.
In France, meanwhile, shortly before 2024 snap elections, the far-right National Rally said it would privatise public broadcasting if it won. Public TV and radio needed “a bit of liberty” and some programmes were too left-leaning, the RN’s vice-president said.
The following year, a party allied to the RN – which could well produce France’s next president – set up an inquiry into the “neutrality, workings and financing” of public TV and radio. Marine Le Pen said both had “a clear problem with neutrality”.
Public service media are meant to provide quality, unbiased, fact-driven content accessible to the broadest audience as part of a free, plural media that safeguards the rule of law by providing reliable, transparent information and scrutinising power.
In Hungary, however, public TV and radio are propaganda machines – and the watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) estimates that thanks to private media acquisitions by regime-friendly oligarchs and inaction by captured regulators, the government controls about 80% of the country’s outlets.
Polls suggest Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, may be ousted in elections on 12 April. But the Orbàn media playbook is serving as a blueprint elsewhere in the EU, with nationalist parties attacking public broadcasters as biased and unaffordable, and their billionaire backers building rival, avowedly rightwing media empires.
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What is the misrule of law series about?
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The rule of law is the set of standards and principles that ensures no one in society is above the law, and that everyone is treated equally, in accordance with the values of democracy and fundamental rights, and under the control of independent courts.
Defined more broadly, it should ensure that authorities use their powers and public resources for citizens’ good. That means, among other things, that people should be accurately and fairly informed by a free and plural media, and able to express their views through civil society organisations and by exercising their right to protest.
To make sure those standards are met, the rule of law requires governments to maintain independent, impartial institutions – including, most obviously, the judiciary.
On 12 April, Hungary will hold a general election in which Viktor Orbán risks defeat. For more than a decade, Orbán has shown how the rule of law can be degraded in a modern EU country.
He has packed the courts with judges loyal to him, and the media with editors happy to parrot his propaganda. He has tyrannised NGOs, and curbed LGBT and other human rights, creating what he has called an “illiberal democracy”.
He may be out next month, but the rule of law is increasingly under threat across Europe. In this series, Guardian correspondents look at the state of the rule of law in four major EU countries: what’s crumbling, and why it matters.
During Meloni’s annual official press conference in early January, she said press freedom was “a fundamental prerequisite of any democracy”. Her government’s attitude towards journalists tells a very different story.
The government has used defamation suits to silence journalists and public intellectuals, and shuts down questions whenever it can. (Meloni herself was caught telling Donald Trump at the White House last summer: “I never want to speak to my press.”)
Since her far-right-led administration came to power, Italy has slid from 41st to 49th in the World Press Freedom Index. When the European Commission flagged this in a rule of law report, Meloni accused left-leaning Italian media of twisting its findings.
There is more. The European rights NGO Liberties notes that last year “political figures” targeted journalists with not just legal attacks but also physical intimidation and smear campaigns. New concerns emerged over spyware and surveillance.
Political interference in Rai “continues to increase”, Liberties said, adding to uncertainties including serious funding concerns: the government holds nearly 100% of the public broadcaster’s shares, giving it substantial control over its operations.
“Criticism of a government or opposition to a government is part of democracy,” said Lorenzo De Sio, of Luiss University in Rome. “But what we have here is a government that finds criticism a nuisance … They try not to answer questions.”
In France, even with the far right not (yet) in power, the picture is not much different. The far-right-led parliamentary inquiry into public broadcasting was described by Le Monde as an “ideological war machine” aimed at “policing public opinion”.
Public broadcasting must be accountable, the paper said, but this “witch-hunt” was “less about reforming than silencing. As regards pluralism and diversity of opinion, the public service has no lessons to learn from those who have sworn to destroy it.”
Meanwhile, RSF describes the concentration of private media ownership in France as “a major concern”. The rightwing tycoon Vincent Bolloré controls France’s most-watched news channel, CNews, plus a radio station, a weekly magazine and a Sunday newspaper.
RSF said Bolloré’s interventionism and the “lack of pluralism” were “raising fears of the triumph of opinion over facts”. Last year France’s rightwing former culture minister, Rachida Dati, used CNews and Bolloré’s Journal du Dimanche to attack public service media.
In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has long had the country’s vast, well-funded network of public broadcasters in its sights, calling for far-reaching change at the outlets, which are financed by audience fees.
AfD, which is now the biggest opposition party and could this year seize regional power for the first time, claims the national broadcasters ARD and ZDF and their regional affiliates are government mouthpieces biased towards mainstream parties.
Two east German states, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, are due to hold votes in September and polls show the AfD surging towards 40% support, which could be enough to give it overall control depending on other parties’ performance.
If elected, the AfD has said it would fight to restructure public broadcasting and cut the €18 (£16) monthly fee paid by every household – a move it tried in Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, where it does not have majorities and so was voted down.
“We want to finally pull the plug on this woke, anti-German and manipulative influence,” said Ulrich Siegmund, the party’s parliamentary group co-leader in Saxony-Anhalt, adding that it aimed to “terminate” the public broadcasting agreement.
Moderate rightwing parties have also accused the public service of bias, prompting Spiegel magazine to ask if there was still hope for public TV and radio, “increasingly – and not just from the right – seen as a mouthpiece for urban, progressive elites”.
Defenders of the public broadcasters note that Germany’s Basic Law, or constitution, stipulates the “basic provision” of public media access to citizens, allowing them to be informed and engaged citizens of a healthy and representative democracy.
They see the crusade against the broadcasters as a transparent attempt to pave the way towards authoritarianism in Germany. “They don’t want independent journalism,” a media affairs expert with the Social Democrats, Holger Hövelmann, said of the AfD. “They want media that spread messages that are politically opportune for them. They despise this pluralistic society.”
That was also what critics argued was the guiding principle of Law and Justice (PiS), the nationalist party that ran Poland for eight years until 2023.
After years of blatant pro-government propaganda, the new government saw public media as a top priority and resorted to placing the outlets into administration and using commercial law to take managerial control.
The public broadcaster, TVP, was rocked by the changes in the run-up to Christmas in 2023, with its news channel TVP Info forced off air for more than a week and the main news bulletin given a new name to mark a break from the previous era.
But Poland’s public media remains politicised within a deeply polarised media landscape. An Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe report from last year’s presidential election said the rocky transition “failed to ensure impartiality, despite some reporting improvements”.
The Federation of Screenwriters in Europe said the far-right media playbook aimed to “delegitimise journalism, intimidate critics, concentrate media influence, weaponise regulators – and defund or capture public institutions that shape shared reality”.
Addressing the French parliament’s inquiry last week, Bolloré denied he was waging a political war, claiming he was the “perfect scapegoat” for a hostile elite. “We do not bow,” the billionaire said. “We are free. And that’s why we displease.”