US Vice President JD Vance met the leader of a German far-right party during a visit to Munich, Germany, on Friday, nine days before a German election. During his visit he lectured European leaders about the state of democracy and said there is no place for “firewalls.”
Vance met with Alice Weidel, the coleader and candidate for chancellor of the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, his office said.
Mainstream German parties say they would not work with the party. That stance is often referred to as a “firewall.” Polls put AfD in second place going into the election on Sunday next week with about 20 percent support.
Photo: AP
News of the meeting came after top German officials pushed back hard against Vance’s complaints about the state of democracy in Europe, with the defense minister calling it “unacceptable” to draw a parallel with authoritarian governments. He and Chancellor Olaf Scholz defended German mainstream parties’ firewall.
Vance said at the Munich Security Conference that he fears free speech is “in retreat” across the continent.
“To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election,” Vance said.
German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius, speaking a couple of hours later, said he could not let the speech go without comment.
“If I understood him correctly, he is comparing conditions in parts of Europe with those in authoritarian regimes,” Pistorius said. “That is unacceptable, and it is not the Europe and not the democracy in which I live and am currently campaigning.”
Vance also told European leaders that “if you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”
He said no democracy could survive telling millions of voters that their concerns “are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.”
“Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters,” he said. “There’s no room for firewalls.”
Pistorius countered that “every opinion has a voice in this democracy. It makes it possible for partly extremist parties like AfD to campaign completely normally, just like every other party.”
He said that Weidel was on prime-time German television on Thursday night along with the other contenders.
However, he added that “democracy doesn’t mean that the loud minority is automatically right,” and that “democracy must be able to defend itself against the extremists who want to destroy it.”
Scholz took to social network X to “emphatically reject” Vance’s comments.
“Out of the experiences of Nazism, the democratic parties in Germany have a joint consensus — that is the firewall against extreme right-wing parties,” he wrote.
Bavarian Premier Markus Soder — a prominent figure in Germany’s center-right opposition bloc, which leads pre-election polls — told reporters that “we take every opinion seriously, but we decide ourselves with whom we form a coalition,” German news agency dpa reported.
Vance’s meeting with Weidel came after she was received on Wednesday by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The US vice president’s office said Vance on Friday also met with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Christian Democratic Union party chairman Friedrich Merz, while he met Scholz earlier this week when both were in Paris for a summit on artificial intelligence
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store took issue with how Vance urged European officials to stem irregular migration in Friday’s speech.
Vance said the European electorate did not vote to open “floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.”
“He speaks as though we are not focused on immigration in Europe,” Gahr Store said. “I mean, this is the big theme in every country, that we want to have control of our borders.”
He said that Ukrainian refugees accounted for a significant increase in unvetted immigrants over the past few years — and they were accepted “because there is a bloody war going on, which he did not mention, which I think is not really addressing reality.”
“I don’t agree with him that what’s happening in Ukraine, what’s happening in Russia, what’s happening in China is less important than the presumed loss of freedom of speech in Europe,” Gahr Store said.
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