The owner of Politico has praised the “inspiring message” of JD Vance’s speech that was met with horror in Europe, as he berated the continent’s politicians for their “whiny” response to the US vice-president.
Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, said many people had “intentionally misunderstood” Vance’s address at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference, in which he stunned the audience by claiming restrictions on freedom of expression in Europe were a greater threat to the region than Russia or China.
The US vice-president also called for an end to the political isolation of the far-right just over a week before German federal elections, in which the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is expected to secure a historic second-place finish.
The speech drew a sharp response from leading German politicians, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz and opposition leader Friedrich Merz. Yet Döpfner — a German national who co-owns the Berlin-based media empire — said Vance’s intended message was that Washington wanted to work with Europe but the continent needed to first define what it stood for and stop being afraid of its own people.
“Honestly, I think it’s an inspiring message,” he told the Financial Times in a podcast interview. “You don’t have to take everything literally, but you should try to take it seriously. And [the fact] that most of the Europeans just reacted . . . in a kind of whiny tone — I think that is unsmart, it’s unstrategic and it’s even dangerous because we need a transatlantic security alliance and we need a transatlantic trade relationship.”
US President Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on EU goods and to withdraw security guarantees for the continent.
Döpfner, a self-described contrarian who has railed against the “enslavement” of so-called woke culture, also played down the seriousness of Trump’s recent attack on Politico as a “misunderstanding”.
Axel Springer bought the outlet in 2021 as part of a push into the US media market.
Trump this month described Politico, which prides itself on political impartiality, as a “leftwing rag” and falsely claimed it had received $8mn in funding from the US Agency for International Development, an organisation the US president has moved to shrink dramatically.
Döpfner said Trump was muddling subsidies with subscriptions to a commercial product. “This can only be a misunderstanding,” he said. “And I hope that it will be clarified.”
But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said “subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayer’s dime will no longer be happening”.
The US president’s criticism of Politico put Döpfner in the unusual position of being criticised from the right. The Axel Springer chief said it was “absolutely obvious” that there was some truth to the claim by Trump and his supporters that there was a leftwing bias within the mainstream media.
But he said he hoped the Trump administration’s commitment to free speech would “also be upheld for journalism that you don’t like”.
“For me, it’s almost funny, after two and a half decades being portrayed in Germany as the centre of the rightwing conspiracy, I’m now portrayed in America as the centre of a leftwing conspiracy,” he said. “Honestly, that’s exactly the position where an independent publisher should be.”
Döpfner, 62, is a contentious figure in Germany. Critics, especially on the left, accuse his tabloid Bild and the conservative broadsheet Die Welt of pursuing a rightwing agenda, including on migration.
Döpfner was rocked by a scandal four years ago when he was accused of shielding a former Bild editor and protégé who faced allegations of abusing his power by sleeping with staff and was ultimately fired.
In 2023, Döpfner apologised after the publication of leaked private text messages in which he railed against “intolerant Muslims” and asked the Bild editor to “strengthen” the economically liberal Free Democrats two days before an election.
The former music journalist — who became a billionaire overnight in 2020 when the widow of the company’s founder sold him 4 per cent of her shares in Axel Springer, gifted him 15 per cent more and handed him her voting rights — has a lower profile in the US despite his expansion into the American market and his seat on the board of Netflix.
But in 2020, he hit the headlines after it emerged he sent an email to staff inviting them to “pray” for Trump’s re-election — a comment he later said was “an ironic, provocative statement in the circle of people that hate Donald Trump”.
He has also courted US tech entrepreneurs including the Tesla chief executive and Trump supporter Elon Musk, who attended his 60th birthday party in Tuscany.
He sent text messages to Musk urging him to buy Twitter, now known as X, shortly before the Tesla founder’s bid for the social media platform became public in 2022.
Döpfner, who has called for TikTok to be banned in Europe over its links to the Chinese government and the proliferation of antisemitic and right-wing extremist views, sidestepped a question about similar content on X since Musk’s takeover, saying: “Honestly, I cannot judge it,” he said. “I’m not active enough.”
He also addressed long-running speculation that he would be interested in buying Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, describing it as a “super brand” that could tempt him into making a print acquisition, though he played down the chance of it coming up for sale.
Speaking amid talk that Murdoch could seek to offload the title to avoid passing it on to three of his children amid a bitter family feud, Döpfner said he was focused on his digital portfolio and “in general . . . we would not buy newspapers”.
But he said the Wall Street Journal was one of “two super brands in the world that I’m very passionate about”, with the other being the FT, which he tried unsuccessfully to acquire 10 years ago.
Döpfner insisted the idea of a bid for the paper was “highly theoretical”, adding: “According to my information, the Wall Street Journal is not for sale.”
He added that, if the title were to become available, “of course, we would most likely look into it”.
In a reference to the potentially high price tag for a paper whose parent company Murdoch bought for $5.6bn in 2007, he insisted: “The likelihood that we would really buy it, that we would get it, is close to zero.”
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