As US vice-president JD Vance this week asserted that Europe itself — more than Russia or China — had turned into a threat to democratic values, Germany’s defence minister Boris Pistorius grew visibly irritated.
“This is unacceptable,” he was heard blurting out from the audience.
The European leaders, generals and intelligence chiefs gathered at the annual Munich Security Conference were anxiously awaiting clarification on vital questions such as how to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, contain Vladimir Putin’s hybrid warfare and beef up the transatlantic alliance.
Instead Donald Trump’s emissary lashed out at them for allegedly suppressing free speech, failing to stop mass immigration and sounding like Soviet-era propagandists by using terms such as “misinformation, disinformation”.
After Vance’s address, Pistorius ran to a room with two advisers to rewrite the speech he had been due to deliver that same afternoon. Less than an hour later, the Social Democrat — whose straight talking has helped make him Germany’s most popular politician — stood at the lectern, visibly angry.
“He talks about annihilation of democracy and, if I understood him correctly, he compares the situation in certain parts of Europe to authoritarian regimes,” Pistorius said. “Ladies and gentlemen, that is not acceptable.”
Vance’s sharp words were just part of a week of reckoning for Europeans, who discovered on Wednesday that Trump had called Vladimir Putin to start “immediate” negotiations over a deal to end the war in Ukraine, without consulting them or Kyiv beforehand.
Earlier in the day, they had found out that US defence secretary Pete Hegseth had already given up on Nato membership for Kyiv and on the country’s territorial integrity before negotiations had even started.
Nowhere in Europe has Vance’s diatribe caused more disarray and angst than in Germany, the conference’s host, which is holding elections next weekend under the shadow of a rising far-right.
For the last eight decades, the transatlantic relationship has underpinned the country’s democratic rebirth, economic recovery and military protection as Berlin sought to turn its back on its Nazi past.
The vice-president’s words rattled even the staunchest German transatlanticists. Friedrich Merz, the 69-year-old leader of the Christian Democrats and favourite to become the next German chancellor, accused the Trump administration of “interfering quite openly in an election”.
“It is not the job of the American government to explain to us here in Germany how to protect our democratic institutions,” he said.
After Trump’s return to the White House, German officials were braced for being singled out for criticism by the US president, who used his first term to target former chancellor Angela Merkel. They knew they would have to pour more money into defence after years of failing to meet Nato’s target of spending 2 per cent of GDP, and that their large trade surplus with the US would probably result in painful tariffs on car imports.
But they were not prepared for Trump and his inner circle to attack the foundations of their political order — and swing behind the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which mainstream parties have long sought to isolate with a “firewall” that makes co-operation taboo.
In his speech on Friday, Vance called for the end of such firewalls. Shortly afterwards, he took the unprecedented step of meeting AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, whom the conference organisers had barred from attending. Meanwhile it transpired that Vance had refused to meet Germany’s Social Democratic chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose unpopular party is predicted to come third in the election on February 23.
Germany “will not accept outsiders interfering in favour of this party in our democracy, in our elections,” Scholz said in a speech on Saturday. “This is not appropriate, especially not among friends and allies . . . We will decide for ourselves what happens to our democracy.”
Vance’s fiery critique has added to a sense of upheaval in Germany, which has been reeling from three deadly attacks in as many months by asylum seekers and a fraught national debate on immigration. The latest incident — when an Afghan national drove through a crowd of protesting union members — occurred on the eve of the conference, little more than 1km from the ornate Bayerische Hof hotel where it took place.
The AfD, previously so toxic that it was even shunned by the likes of France’s Marine Le Pen, has been left cock-a-hoop at its embrace by the global populist right.
First it won the backing of X owner and Trump aide Elon Musk, whom Weidel has personally courted for more than a year. On Wednesday, Weidel, whose party is predicted to secure a record 20 per cent of the vote, was hosted in Budapest by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who described her as “the future” and called for her to be welcomed into the fold of western politics.
It is not the first time that German-American relations have come under strain at the Munich conference, which for more than 60 years has been one of the most important events in the calendar for members of the transatlantic alliance.
German and US officials clashed in the past over George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Germany’s commitment to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia. But never have the exchanges been so fiery.
Outraged European delegates were roughly divided into two camps: those who saw Vance’s words and deeds as a sign that the continent needed to rapidly come up with a plan to stop relying on US support; and those who believed the vice-president was being deliberately provocative but was not signalling a major shift in policy.
“We don’t want to break [with the US] and I hope they don’t as well,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat, told the FT. “We don’t want to start a fight on the basis of statements made in public.”
But another senior European official said: “They’re not an adversary, but given what we have heard today we should think of the US as a foreign country.”
Some German officials found hope in the fact that Vance and Hegseth appeared more conciliatory in private meetings. They said that Hegseth had told one European official: “We know you are the good guys.”
One senior European official reckoned that America was “not retreating from Europe” but instead “moving to an aggressively transactional foreign policy”.
But others were more alarmed. “Vance is a rightwing extremist politician supported by US Big Tech oligarchs, whose aim is to gradually destroy the EU,” said Anton Hofreiter, a German Green MP.
Robert Habeck, Germany’s Green vice-chancellor, said the speech was a “turning point” in the relationship between Europe and the US.
The US government had “rhetorically and politically sided with the autocrats”, he said. Over the course of the weekend in Munich, “the western community of values was terminated here”.
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