European leaders should end the isolation of far-right parties across the Continent, US vice-president JD Vance has said.
The comments mark an extraordinary embrace of a once-fringe political movement with which the Trump administration shares a common approach on migration, identity and internet speech.
The address stunned and silenced hundreds of attendees at the Munich Security Conference, a forum where top-level politicians, diplomats and analysts had gathered expecting to hear US president Donald Trump’s plans for ending the war in Ukraine and Europe’s defence against a rising Russian threat.
Mr Vance singled out his German hosts, telling them to drop their objections to working with a party that has often revelled in banned Nazi slogans and has been shunned from government as a result.
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He did not mention the party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, by name, but he directly referred to the long-standing agreement by mainstream German politicians to freeze out the group, parts of which have been formally classified as extremist by German intelligence services.
“There is no room for firewalls,” Mr Vance said, bringing some gasps in the hall.
He punctuated the message by meeting Alice Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor in this month’s election, as well as other German leaders.
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Altogether, it was an astonishing intervention in the domestic politics of a democratic American ally.
The vice-president offered what may be a preview under Mr Trump of a redefinition of a transatlantic relationship built on postwar bonds of stability between allied governments.
Mr Vance aggressively challenged the diplomats in the hall in Munich, telling them that their biggest security threat was not from China or Russia, but “the enemy within” – what he called their suppression of abortion protests and other forms of free speech.
He made the claim at a moment when Russia was waging the largest ground war in Europe since 1945 over Ukraine. It signalled the Trump administration’s priorities – expanding the Maga movement rather than halting Russian president Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
Mr Vance’s remarks echoed those of hard-right leaders across Europe and the anti-establishment messages that Russia has pumped on to social media in an effort to destabilise democratic politics in the US and Europe.
Mr Trump, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office later on Friday, called it “a very brilliant speech”.
“I heard his speech, and he talked about freedom of speech,” he said. “And I think it’s true in Europe; it’s losing. They’re losing their wonderful right of freedom of speech. I see it. I mean, I thought he made a very good speech, actually, a very brilliant speech.”
Mr Vance is the second figure in the Trump administration to try to chip away at the efforts to isolate the far-right before the German elections on February 23rd by attempting to destigmatise the AfD.
Billionaire Elon Musk, a top adviser to Mr Trump, endorsed the AfD late last year in a post on social media. He has publicly interviewed Ms Weidel. And in an address to party members this month, Mr Musk said Germany has “too much focus on past guilt”. That was a clear reference to Adolf Hitler’s long shadow, which continues to dominate mainstream German politics, including in tight legal restrictions against Nazi language.
Mr Vance’s remarks drew a furious response from German leaders across most party lines. They immediately rejected his suggestion that they should drop their firewall against the AfD, pointing to past comments by the party’s members in support of the National Socialists, or Nazis.
Boris Pistorius, the German minister for defence and a member of the governing Social Democrats, deviated from his planned speech Friday afternoon to rebuke Mr Vance.
“If I understood him correctly, he is comparing parts of Europe with authoritarian regimes – this is not acceptable,” he said, drawing sustained applause. “This is not the Europe, not the democracy, where I live.”
The AfD and its members have a history of use of Nazi language and anti-Semitic and racist comments, along with plots to overthrow the federal government. The party has surged to second in the polls with its call to crack down on immigration.
Germany has been the most successful major European power at shutting its hard-right party out of power, along with France, where a group of rival parties engaged in strategic voting last summer to deny the hard-right National Rally a parliamentary majority.
Other firewalls have fallen around Europe, including in the Netherlands, Hungary and Italy. In Austria, the hard-right Freedom Party has been part of federal coalitions and appeared set to lead its next government, before negotiations with a centre-right party collapsed this week.
In his speech, Mr Vance seemed to lump those restrictions into a long list of what he called European deviations from democratic values and attacks on free speech.
Those failures, he said, included efforts to restrict misinformation and other content on social media, and laws against abortion protests that he said unfairly silenced Christians.
“If you are running in fear of your own voters,” Mr Vance said, “there is nothing America can do for you.”
European intelligence agencies have raised alarms about what they consider to be a systematic effort by Russia at mass disinformation and propaganda, often by using fake social media accounts to sow division and doubt about democratic systems.
Mr Vance ridiculed and diminished that threat.
“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,” he added.
He also poured scorn on the decision in “remote Romania,” as he called it, to cancel a presidential election because of clear evidence of Russian manipulation of the political campaign.
“If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with,” he said.
Such statements came as something of a shock for attendees who had hoped to learn more about the administration’s plans for peace negotiations with Russia. Mr Vance barely mentioned Ukraine.
“While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defence,” Mr Vance said.
“The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor,” he said, adding, “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States.”
Mr Vance also denounced the mass migration into Germany and other nations in 2015, which included many asylum seekers fleeing wars in Afghanistan and Syria.
He tied the migration to terrorist crimes, including a car attack in Munich on Thursday by an Afghan asylum seeker, which injured 30 people. – This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
