Comment by MrGilbert
12 hours ago
Conservatives and right-wing. Gives them more control. It‘s a pattern that gets obvious once you see it. It’s so they can hide their own secrets better. In Germany, we have a law that grants you access to information, the "Informationsfreiheitsgesetz“. This was used in the past to uncover morally wrong or illegal behavior, mostly done by the conservative party. This party, as they are currently in charge, is now actively working to change the law, so it's in their benefit.
I’m not familiar with the political landscape in Europe so it may well be mostly people on the right pushing this, but man I wish we could stop framing everything as left vs right.
That framing is distracting us from the authoritarian vs civil liberties issues, which is a dangerous and immediate threat to our ability to have any significant political influence of any kind.
Conservative politicians and leaders as they label themselves and practically act in today's political landscape are fundamentally on the authoritarian and anti-civil liberties side - there is no distraction. The right is only worse in the extent of authoritarianism and destruction of human rights they're willing to go to and the speed at which they want to achieve it.
If a conservative wants to preserve some status quo, basically all policy they use (and have available as a tool) in a permanently changing and developing world (socially, technologically) is that of restrictions, especially on civil rights, and of authoritarian mechanisms like police power. For weird reasons, conservatives never* want to preserve status quo civil rights like workers rights, freedom of information rights and similar that are anti-authoritatian.
There is no “authoritarian left” anywhere in the West, outside of a few vestigial Communist parties with close to zero influence.
This can change in the future, as it has before, but in 2026, even libertarians only care about personal freedom for a certain class of people.
Sadly does not really seems tied to left or right directly.
In Spain (you can see this in the website) our traditional left and right parties are largely in favor, while the parties in both ends of the spectrum (at the lack of better term: far left and far right) seem to be largely against.
The sad thing is that it seems that the parties that are already established or likely to alternative in power are the ones that are pushing for it, and this makes it very difficult to fight against
Interesting - maybe my view is biased. So it's about the people that are in power or more likely to be in power. Hm. Makes sense, thinking about it. Maybe power does, in fact, change your principles.
This again, according to https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ for Germany, Chat Contol is generally supported by de-facto left-wing(support immigration, social security, LGBT movement, positive discrimination, progressive tax, worker rights) CDU and CSU (29 of 34 "Yes" votes with 97 votes in total)
pirate parties are usually considered left wing and they all vote against. privacy is a big part of their platform.
there is more than one left wing faction in the eu - we got greens (more radical and oppose chat control), s&d (mainstream parties like german spd, mostly support), the left (hardcore socialist/communists) and renew europe (centrist liberals). none of them are completely united on this.
far right parties are also against chat control most of the time. christian parties (moderate right wing) support it for moral reasons. its really more of a establishment/alternative issue than left/right.