Vice President JD Vance met the leader of a German far-right party in Munich on Friday, nine days before a German election and after scolding European leaders about the state of democracy. Vance met with Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party and candidate for chancellor, his office said. Mainstream German parties say they won't work with the party, which polls have in second place going into the election, the AP reports, with about 20% support. "Excellent speech!" Weidel had posted on X after Vance said European governments should not exclude anti-migration, nationalist voices.
Vance is the most senior American official to meet with Weidel, per the Washington Post, though Elon Musk hosted a livestream with her and addressed a party rally remotely. Vance and Weidel were said to have discussed the war in Ukraine, German politics, and the "firewall" that shuts ultra-nationalist parties like the AfD out of ruling coalitions, per the Guardian. Vance had defended nationalist parties in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in what the New York Times described as "extraordinary intervention in the domestic politics of a democratic American ally," made without mentioning the AfD by name. The speech was met with stunned silence by the hundreds of people attending it, broken by a few gasps.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz defended mainstream parties on the issue and wrote a post on X to "emphatically reject" Vance's comments, per the AP. "Out of the experiences of Nazism, the democratic parties in Germany have a joint consensus—that is the firewall against extreme right-wing parties." The Times reports Vance's speech suggests a different kind of foreign policy in the Trump administration: "one not built on postwar bonds of stability between allied governments, but rather on ties with once-fringe political parties that share a common approach to migration, identity and internet speech." (More JD Vance stories.)
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