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The co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany praised Donald Trump as the “right man” to end the war in Ukraine and urged her country to remain a “neutral mediator” in a heated four-way televised debate ahead of general elections next Sunday.
Europe’s largest country is entering its final week of campaigning as it grapples with a stagnating economy, a fraught immigration debate and profound angst over the fast-deteriorating transatlantic relationship under the new Trump administration, which has openly swung behind the AfD.
During a two-hour primetime show, AfD candidate Alice Weidel emerged as the prime target of Social Democratic chancellor Olaf Scholz, Green party candidate Robert Habeck and Christian Democratic party leader Friedrich Merz. One by one they confronted the far-right politician on topics including the war in Ukraine and her party’s association with Nazi ideology.
Weidel boasted about the support she received from US vice-president JD Vance, who met her on the sidelines of the annual Munich Security Conference at the weekend. The 46-year-old politician welcomed Vance’s speech to the conference participants urging Europe’s mainstream politicians to engage with far-right, anti-establishment parties.
“Vance has confessed that you can’t build firewalls to exclude millions of voters from the outset. He made it clear that we need to talk to each other,” Weidel said.
Weidel, whose party is predicted to win a record 20 per cent of the vote on February 23, has seized on US support since Trump’s return to the White House.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a close adviser to Trump, has repeatedly used his X social media company to promote the AfD, a party suspected of right-wing extremism by Germany’s intelligence agency. Weidel was also hosted in Budapest by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who described her as “the future”.
The latest show of support from Vance, who snubbed Scholz in Munich, has caused anger among Germany’s established parties, which have all refused to enter a coalition with AfD. This anger spilled frequently into the open during the debate on Sunday.
Merz, whose CDU party is predicted to win the election with about 30 per cent of the votes, accused Weidel of keeping extremists in her party such as Björn Höcke, who last autumn won regional elections in the eastern state of Thuringia, and “whom every man and woman in Germany can call a Nazi with impunity”. Höcke was convicted of knowingly using a banned Nazi slogan last year.
“We have a good tradition in Germany, which consists of learning lessons from the experiences of National Socialism,” Scholz also told Weidel. “There is no co-operation with the extreme right.”
“I find this comparison scandalous,” the far-right candidate responded. “Look, you can insult me here tonight as you like. You are insulting millions of voters.”
Vance’s address to the Munich Security Conference and Trump’s move to negotiate a peace settlement with Vladimir Putin without consulting Kyiv and its European allies beforehand loomed large.
Candidates clashed over how to fund billions in extra defence spending as well as the thorny questions of sending troops to Ukraine as part of post-settlement security guarantees — a topic that will be discussed at a meeting organised by French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Monday.
“What has happened in recent weeks and with the Munich Security Conference cannot be taken seriously enough, because the Trump administration is launching a frontal attack on the west’s community of values,” Habeck said.
Merz criticised Scholz for letting the French leader co-ordinate an EU response to Trump’s negotiations with Putin. He also accused the chancellor, whose SPD party is lagging in third place with 15 per cent of predicted votes, of withholding military aid to Ukraine for political reasons.
But throughout the debate, which covered a broad range of topics including immigration and the economy, the frontrunner to become chancellor kept his sharpest criticism for Weidel.
Responding to her suggestions that Germany should not take sides in the conflict, he said: “No, we are not neutral, we are not in between. We are on Ukraine’s side and, together with Ukraine, we are defending the political order that we have here.”
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