“In my view, it’s a tactically astute move to bring Gerhard Schröder — who, after all, still enjoys considerable popularity in Germany — back into the picture, as if to say, ‘If you want, we can negotiate,’” said Georg Maier, the SPD interior minister of the eastern state of Thuringia. “It’s basically a lie, because if you actually wanted to negotiate, you wouldn’t need Gerhard Schröder for that. But of course, the impression meant to be created is that the [German] government wants this war and wants to sell weapons, wants to expand NATO’s influence — and this disinformation is working.”
The AfD too says it’s ready to talk to Russia given what it portays as Merz’s refusal to do so. This week AfD leader Alice Weidel suggested Ukraine, not Russia, poses a threat to Germany, and said her party was willing to talk peace with Putin.
“We consider Ukraine’s conduct of the war to be absolutely disastrous, posing an immense security risk to Germany,” she said in Berlin. “A German government led by the AfD will advocate for peace with Russia,” she added, “for reconciliation and dialogue.”
‘Unrecoverable economic collapse’
Kirill Dmitriev — a close Putin ally and Kremlin envoy involved in talks with the Trump administration over the war in Ukraine — has also cast an AfD-led government in Germany as the cure for the country’s economic malaise, for the simple reason that the party would restore energy imports from Russia
“Expect much worse until German bureaucrats change course and atone for their wrong decisions. Or AfD saves the day,” Dmitriev wrote earlier this month on X in response to a news article about falling German industrial production. “Without Russian gas, at the time of the worst energy crisis in history, Germany is not just heading towards long-term stagnation but an immediate unrecoverable economic collapse,” Dmitriev also posted in April.
This is a message also frequently echoed by AfD politicians, who are calling for the reactivation of the Nord Stream pipelines that supplied Russian natural gas to Germany before 2022.