Enemy of the state: the political persecution of Ulrike Guérot

For years, Guérot was one of Germany’s most respected political scientists. But after she criticised the pandemic response and the proxy war in Ukraine, she found herself cast as a public enemy

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Many readers may never have heard of Ulrike Guérot — but by the end of this article, they’ll be wondering how that’s possible, given that she stands at the centre of one of the most astonishing cases of political persecution in Europe in recent history.

Just a few years ago, Guérot was celebrated as one of Germany’s — and Europe’s — most respected political scientists and leading voices on European integration. For anyone who has followed the debate over the EU’s future in the past two decades, it would have been nearly impossible not to come across Guérot and her ideas about the “European Republic”. As a prolific scholar and public intellectual, she was often invited to speak on various aspects of EU policy.

I first met Guérot in 2018 in Helsinki, where we engaged in a spirited public debate about the European Union. While we agreed on the bloc’s shortcomings in its current form, we diverged sharply on the remedy: I advocated for dissolving the EU and returning to sovereign nation-states, whereas Guérot championed a radical democratisation of the Union. Guérot’s vision was inspiring, but it also fit squarely within a long-standing tradition of progressive Europeanism — a perspective that, particularly in academic circles, has long represented the mainstream.

Indeed, for much of her career, Guérot was a fully-fledged member of Germany’s (and Europe’s) intellectual-political establishment. She started out in the Nineties working under the under the auspices of high-profile politicians like Karl Lamers, then foreign affairs spokesperson of the German Christian Democratic Party, and Jacques Delors, former president of the EU Commission.

From the early 2000s onwards, she first took on the role of foreign policy director of the German Marshall Fund and then of director of the European Council on Foreign Relations — two of Europe’s most important transatlantic think tanks. In 2013, Guérot was even part of the official delegation of the German President Joachim Gauck on his state visit to France.

By the mid-2010s, when she cofounded the European Democracy Lab, which is attached to the European School of Governance in Berlin, Guérot had established herself as one of the foremost experts on European affairs, publishing widely on German and European newspapers and often appearing on talk shows in her home country.

After our encounter in Helsinki, Guérot and I continued to exchange ideas about Europe from time to time — until the pandemic struck. As I struggled to make sense of the madness that engulfed the world in 2020, I found myself drifting away from the European (dis)integration debate that had long defined my work.

Moreover, as a writer from the left who took a very critical stance on the Covid regime, that experience marked a definitive break with the political community that I had once considered my own. In the hyper-polarised atmosphere of the pandemic, whatever common ground I still shared with the mainstream left — which had once made dialogue with liberal progressives like Guérot possible — was swept away for good. Indeed, I must admit, somewhat sheepishly, that I had simply assumed Guérot had aligned herself with the Covid orthodoxy — as virtually all her peers in the intellectual and academic establishment had.

That’s why, when she called me out of the blue two years ago, I was stunned by the story she had to tell — and somewhat ashamed that it had unfolded entirely beneath my radar. She recounted how, since we had last spoken, she had become one of Germany’s most vilified figures — dismissed from her university post, smeared across the media, ostracised by the academic establishment and even labeled an enemy of the state. I was speechless. How could this have happened to one of the country’s most revered public intellectuals?

Guérot’s fall from grace began in October 2020, when she began publicly criticising the pandemic measures, the growing climate of ideological conformity and the alarming narrowing of acceptable opinion that accompanied it — a context in which anyone who questioned Covid policy was swiftly met with hostility by the political and media establishment.

From Guérot’s liberal-progressive perspective — perhaps a touch naïve — she was merely upholding Habermasian principles of open discourse: the belief that public opinion should emerge from the power of the better argument. At first, not even she fully realised the extent of the authoritarian “new normal” ushered in by the pandemic — or that, by questioning the pandemic restrictions and warning of democratic backsliding, she had crossed an invisible red line. Almost overnight, her public persona shifted in the eyes of institutions, the media and large swathes of the public — from celebrated thinker to “problematic figure”.

Following critical comments and essays, Guérot became the target of intense media scrutiny and social media outrage. Articles no longer discussed her arguments; they attacked her personally, labelling her “controversial” and dismissing her as a “conspiracy theorist”. The fact that her principled stance made her increasingly popular among anti-lockdown protestors, which organised large demonstrations in Berlin and other cities in the summer of 2020 — swiftly branded as “far right” by the political-media establishment — only deepened the backlash against her. In the eyes of many, Guérot, a lifelong progressive, was now a “fascist by association”.

Nonetheless, in early 2021, her academic standing still seemed intact. In the spring of 2021, she was hired by the prestigious University of Bonn — the coronation of years of academic research on European policy issues. Despite the controversy surrounding her stance on Covid, Guérot was warmly received by her colleagues at the university, who were clearly pleased to welcome such a high-profile and accomplished figure into their ranks.

That year, during the Christmas holidays, Guérot put her critique of the of the pandemic policies to paper. The result was Wer schweigt, stimmt zu — Silence Means Consent — published in March 2022. The book, which sharply criticised the disproportionality of the government’s Covid response and called for an urgent social and public reckoning, was a big success. It remained in the bestseller list for weeks, and Guérot was inundated with letters and emails by people thanking her for giving voice to a large segment of German society that had been muted or slandered in official public discourse.

The academic world, on the other hand, sharply turned against Guérot: it was one thing to write articles or give interviews — but to publish an entire book, and a bestselling one at that, openly criticising those who were, in her words, “willing to sacrifice democracy to a virus and gamble away their freedom for supposed safety”, was quite another. She had crossed another invisible red line. Prominent academics attacked her on Twitter. Invitations to conferences started to dwindle. Even at her still relatively new workplace at the University of Bonn, students and colleagues started shunning her — or actively mobilising against her. The pandemic had exposed a widening chasm between the academic world and the broader public and Guérot found herself caught in the middle.

Meanwhile, just before the book was published, Russia had invaded Ukraine, further poisoning and militarising the public debate. The Manichaean thinking and moral absolutism that had defined the Covid era intensified even further. Supporting Ukraine became a civic litmus test; criticism of government policy was no longer seen as a “threat to public health” but was now framed as bordering on treason. Once again, Guérot found herself at the centre of all this.

In the first half of 2022, in a couple of, by then rare, TV appearances, she called for peace, dialogue and diplomacy — drawing hysterical responses from the other guests on the shows, all categorically in the pro-war camp. Once again, Guérot found herself thrust into the media spotlight — and once again, cast into a role not of her choosing, this time as a so-called “Putin apologist”. This triggered another massive wave of attacks against her, including from high-profile politicians. Increasingly, the accusations against Guérot on social media were also directed at the University of Bonn — a clear attempt to publicly shame not only her, but also her employer. Various faculty and student groups at Bonn put out statements against Guérot.

Guérot, however, was undeterred. On the contrary, she began working on a book about the Russia-Ukraine war, determined to publish it as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, in the summer of 2022, the first accusations of plagiarism started to surface in the media. While headline-grabbing, these were in fact relatively minor in nature, involving paraphrased or partially cited material in two books of her. In some cases, she had even acknowledged the mistakes in later editions of the book. The patterns described in the articles — scattered footnotes, vague sourcing and loosely paraphrased ideas — point at worst to oversights due to time constraints, not deceit.

Far more troubling is the fact that some German media outlets devoted considerable resources to conducting a line-by-line forensic examination of Guérot’s entire body of work in a desperate attempt to unearth any error or inconsistency, no matter how minor. This was not journalism; it was an orchestrated takedown. Indeed, the University of Bonn almost immediately launched an investigation into Guérot for alleged scientific misconduct. Meanwhile, odd things started to happen that suggested that something larger was at play behind this smear campaign — more than just the handiwork of a few journalists with an axe to grind.

For example, the first accusation of plagiarism, which appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on June 4, was already linked on Guérot’s Wikipedia page on the evening of 3 June. Either someone was paying very close attention, or this was part of a more concerted campaign to destroy Guérot’s reputation — one that potentially involved powerful elements within the intelligence and security establishment.

At the time, Guérot herself would have laughed off such claims as paranoid fantasies. That is until she received an unexpected call, in early August 2022, from an old friend working for the BND, Germany’s intelligence agency. He proposed a meeting — but instructed her to leave her phone at home. What he had to say sounded like something straight out of a Frederick Forsyth novel. “You must be careful, Ulrike”, he told her. “You have been targeted. They want to destroy you”. He went on to say that the recent edits to her Wikipedia page could be traced back to a handful of IP addresses — all located across the Atlantic, in Washington. The message was unmistakable: Guérot’s activism had drawn the attention of people high up within NATO circles — in Germany and beyond.

At first, Guérot was sceptical. “Why would such powerful institutions be so scared of someone like me?”, she asked. “I hold no power, no political office”. “You have charisma, Ulrike, people admire and respect you”, her friend replied. “In times like these, that’s exactly the kind of thing that can sway public opinion”. Guérot left the meeting in shock, though a lingering doubt remained: perhaps her friend had overstated things. After all, it’s only natural for intelligence operatives to see conspiracies around every corner. Events, however, would soon dispel her last remaining illusions — or hopes.

In late September, shortly after submitting the manuscript for her book on the Russia-Ukraine war, Guérot’s invitation to serve as a jury member for the prestigious NDR Non-Fiction Prize — publicly announced that same morning — was abruptly revoked within hours. Within days, Ulrike was disinvited from every remaining speaking engagement on her calendar, including long-scheduled lectures in Milan, Brussels, and Vienna. Clearly, a concerted effort was underway to get Guérot cancelled from the public sphere — not just in Germany but across Europe. In one instance, an employee of an Austrian business association — one of the events’ organisers — privately informed Guérot that the cancellation had followed “a call from a higher authority”.

Guérot was now forced to confront the terrifying possibility that her friend had been telling the truth. Her enemies were scorching the earth around her. Becoming slightly paranoid herself, she couldn’t help but wonder whether this sudden wave of cancellations had been deliberately timed to coincide with the imminent release of her new book, which hit the shelves just days later. Co-authored with Hauke Ritz, Endspiel Europa — Endgame Europe — contextualised the Ukraine war as a proxy war between NATO and Russia that had been partly provoked by US interference in Ukraine. This view is increasingly acknowledged today, even by Donald Trump himself — but at the time the book came out it was anathema in Germany (and largely still is to this day).

As with Covid text, the book’s publication triggered a fresh wave of public vilification against Guérot — this time more intense and aggressive than anything she had faced before. By taking on NATO, Guérot had probably crossed the ultimate red line. Her own university issued a public statement distancing itself from both Guérot and her book — though without explicitly naming either. Shortly after, Guérot placed herself on sick leave: two years of relentless attacks — close to 200 malicious articles written against her since late 2021 — and mounting psychological pressure had taken their toll. One could argue that the campaign had achieved its aim: she had been broken, emotionally and psychologically. By this point, most of her friends had shunned her as well. And yet, the final act of cancellation was still to come.

Just a few months later, in February 2023, Guérot was notified that she had been dismissed from the University of Bonn on grounds of plagiarism — without a warning notice or a chance to rectify possible mistakes, as is customary in such cases. There were preliminary investigations that she was a aware of, but due to her sick leave, she had be unable to properly defend herself. The decision was unprecedented: never before in post-war Germany had a professor been dismissed solely for plagiarism. What made it even more absurd was the nature of the alleged infractions — minor citation errors scattered across a dozen pages, amounting to roughly 1% of the total content in works that were not even academic treatises, but polemical essay intended for a general audience.

There can be little doubt that this was a politically motivated decision — one that had nothing to do with Guérot’s academic qualifications or scientific integrity. As one German commentator put it: “Is it not clear that the accusations — even if partly true — served merely as a pretext? At its core, this was about punishing an inconvenient figure, likely with the added aim of deterring others”. This becomes even more apparent when one considers that the university’s ombudsman for suspected cases of scientific misconduct, Prof Dr Klaus F. Gärditz, a constitutional lawyer, had been a vocal supporter of the government measures during the pandemic — and thus was clearly prejudiced against Guérot’s positions.

But to focus on any single individual in this story would be misleading, because what makes Guérot’s fall from grace so striking is the apparent coordination among multiple actors — the media, the university and, if her friend is to be believed, even elements of the NATO intelligence apparatus. Indeed, when looking at the sequence of events, one cannot help but wonder whether the “plagiarism scandal” whipped up by the media was part of a broader strategy, laying the groundwork for a dismissal under the guise of academic misconduct.

As I write this, I’m acutely aware of the irony: attempting to make sense of Guérot’s downfall by invoking what some might call a “conspiracy theory”, in defence of someone whose reputation was dismantled for allegedly promoting such theories herself. But precisely for that reason, we owe it to her — and to intellectual integrity — to follow the evidence wherever it leads, regardless of how it may be received in mainstream circles.

And there is good reason to believe this wasn’t just a witch hunt but a case of political persecution — that Guérot was targeted by powerful forces, including elements of the German state, because she was an influential public intellectual who represented a threat to the status quo. For this, she needed not just to be cancelled but to be destroyed. Over the course of two years, everything Guérot had built over decades was systematically stripped away: her reputation, her credibility, her friendships and ultimately her position — along with her livelihood. One could even argue that her punishment was so severe precisely because, for most of her life, she had been part of the establishment — and was seen as having betrayed it by committing the ultimate heresy: thinking for herself.

Her case stands as a chilling testament to the authoritarian drift of German society, and Western societies more in general, where dissent is no longer debated but punished — even to the point of going after tenured professors, who used to be almost untouchable. It’s a story that should shatter any lingering illusions about the true state of Western liberal democracy. Ultimately, however, one doesn’t need proof of a conspiracy to be appalled by Guérot’s treatment. If every actor involved was indeed operating independently, the picture is arguably even more troubling — that of an establishment so intolerant of dissent and contradiction that it instinctively moves to stamp it out it wherever it arises.

Indeed, a recent study highlighted a sharp increase in dismissals of professors in Germany for expressing opinions that went against mainstream narratives — or, in the authors’ own words, for “ideological insubordination”. This is a notable shift compared to the previous near-inviolability of tenured academic positions. Neither is the crackdown limited to the academic world, of course — it is part of a wider pattern of Stasi-like repression and persecution that has taken hold in Germany. In recent years, people across a wide spectrum of society — including scientists, doctors, lawyers, judges, civil servants and ordinary citizens — have been smeared, fired, silenced or even prosecuted for expressing dissenting views on two of the defining crises of our time: the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

Doctors such as Wolfgang Wodarg and Sucharit Bhakdi, who raised early questions about the proportionality and scientific basis of pandemic policies, were publicly vilified and subjected to institutional (and sometimes legal) pushback. Insurance executive Andreas Schöfbeck lost his job after releasing data that questioned the safety profile of vaccines. Artists and entertainers like Lisa Fitz and Eva Herzig saw performances cancelled and contracts withdrawn for voicing critical opinions. Renowned journalist Gabriele Krone-Schmalz and investigative reporter Patrick Baab were attacked and professionally marginalised for urging diplomatic solutions to the Ukraine conflict.

Even judges and lawyers were not spared. Christian Dettmar, a family court judge, faced legal proceedings after ruling against Covid measures in schools. Writers such as CJ Hopkins (I’ve written about his case here), artists like Simon Rosenthal and political activists like Michael Ballweg — the founder of the Querdenken anti-lockdown movement — were also prosecuted or detained under pretexts that appear increasingly political.

This pattern of repression shows little sign of abating. In fact, under the leadership of Friedrich Merz, it is poised to intensify. The new German chancellor, known for his staunch Atlanticism and belligerent posture toward Russia, has made no secret of his desire to position Germany as a leading military power within NATO. His rhetoric suggests a pivot toward an even more confrontational foreign policy — one that demands not just military rearmament, but also ideological alignment on the home front. In this context, one can expect dissent to be increasingly framed as a threat to national security.

But the story of Guérot — and of other contemporary dissidents like her — is not only one of repression. It is also one of resistance and endurance. By her own admission, she was driven to a very dark place and came very close to breaking point, yet she found the strength to fight back. That strength, in part, came from the groundswell of support she received from what might be called the new German resistance: the millions across the country who rejecting established parties in favour of “populist” alternatives like the AfD and BSW. Indeed, Guérot is currently challenging her dismissal through the court system.

The next hearing is set for May 16 at the Cologne Regional Labour Court. One can only hope the judges will finally acknowledge what has long been evident: that Guérot’s dismissal was politically motivated and without legitimate basis. A ruling in her favour would not only offer a measure of justice after all she has endured, but also send a vital signal — that an independent judiciary still functions in Germany, and that the country’s democratic foundations have not yet been entirely eroded.

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Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)