The German leader said that support for the far-right party ran counter to the country’s lessons from its Nazi past. The Trump administration’s backing of the AfD “is not proper — especially not among friends and allies, and we firmly reject that,” he told the Munich Security Conference.
Vance in his Munich speech on Friday railed against Europe’s establishment politics, urged the continent to curb migration and compared EU leaders to Soviet commissars. He said “there is no room for firewalls,” referencing Germany’s mainstream political parties’ stance rejecting cooperation with the far-right AfD.
Vance also met with AfD lead candidate Alice Weidel on Friday, triggering even stronger backlash from various German politicians. He did not meet with Scholz.
The U.S. vice president’s shock to German politics comes just one week ahead of the German general election on Feb. 23.
According to Scholz: “We will decide for ourselves what happens to our democracy.”
German center-right frontrunner and likely next chancellor Friedrich Merz also told Vance to back off. “We respect the presidential elections and the congressional elections in the U.S. And we expect the U.S. to do the same here,” he said.
Merz also took a swipe at Donald Trump for banning AP from the White House and Air Force One, saying the German government “would never kick out a news agency out of the press room of our chancellory.”
This article was updated to include comments from Friedrich Merz.
