In a ruling that places the boundaries of political expression against the claims of commercial identity, the European Court of Justice determined that Ikea's trademarked visual language — those universally recognized assembly instructions — cannot be freely borrowed by a political party, even in the name of democratic speech. The case arose when Belgium's far-right Vlaams Belang party styled its 2022 migration reform proposal after Ikea's iconic flat-pack aesthetic, prompting a legal challenge that has now reached Europe's highest court. The Luxembourg judges found that where a trademark carr