“Making people believe that receiving public money excludes any form of autonomy of thought fuels dangerous resentment” | EUROtoday

En February, the Observatory of Associative Freedoms printed a examine primarily based on twenty circumstances of obstruction of associative freedoms motivated by an crucial of neutrality, having taken place specifically in 2024 and 2025. Around the identical time, APF France handicap, a big affiliation engaged for nearly a century within the protection of the rights of individuals with disabilities, was violently questioned in sure media and on social networks. It was assumed that receiving public funding didn’t grant him the suitable to specific his concepts and values, that are non-discrimination and the protection of elementary rights and freedoms.

This accusation shouldn’t be new. That it resurfaces at present shouldn’t be insignificant: it comes at a time when the legitimacy of quite a few associations, media and extra broadly middleman our bodies is contested, and the place their freedom of expression is usually overtly known as into query. This is the case when these associations recall the constitutive values ​​of our Republic and which seem as such of their associative undertaking. This additionally happens, extra quietly, on the bottom, when associations make a detrimental evaluation of the general public insurance policies carried out in sure territories and after they obtain thinly veiled threats of their non-renewal throughout requires tasks. Finally, that is additionally the case by way of a misused use of the republican engagement contract.

Let’s ask the query clearly: ought to a corporation that receives public cash surrender expressing its values, its analyses, its disagreements? Should she censor herself? Accept that financing turns into a way of ideological stress?

Democratic deadlock

Linking freedom of expression to the general public origin of funding is harmful reasoning. This is without doubt one of the well-known mechanisms of authoritarian regimes: to silence with out explicitly prohibiting, to constrain with out formally censoring. The consequence is easy: an impoverishment of the democratic debate and a tacit questioning of the associations’ technique of motion.

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