Vance tells Europeans to stop shunning parties deemed extreme
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
US Vice-President J.D. Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference on Feb 14 drew anger from German leaders.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Emma Bubola
Follow topic:
MUNICH – US Vice-President J.D. Vance on Feb 14 urged European leaders to end the isolation of far-right parties across the continent, 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 President Donald Trump’s plans for ending the war in Ukraine
The vice-president 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.
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.
“There is no room for firewalls,” Mr Vance said, bringing some gasps in the hall.
He punctuated the message by meeting Ms Alice Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor in this month’s election, as well as other German leaders on Feb 14. Altogether, it was an unusual 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 trans-Atlantic 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
Mr Vance’s remarks echoed those of hard-right leaders across Europe and the anti-establishment messages that Russia has pumped onto social media in an effort to destabilise democratic politics in America and Europe.
Mr Trump, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Feb 14, called it “a very brilliant speech”.
“I heard his speech, and he talked about freedom of speech,” Mr Trump 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 Feb 23
Billionaire Elon Musk, a top adviser to Trump, endorsed the AfD
He has publicly interviewed Ms Weidel,
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.
Mr Boris Pistorius, the German defence minister and a member of the governing Social Democrats, deviated from his planned speech on the afternoon of Feb 14 to rebuke Mr Vance.
“If I understood him correctly, he is comparing parts of Europe with authoritarian regimes – this is not acceptable,” Mr Pistorius said, drawing sustained applause. “This is not the Europe, not the democracy, where I live.”
Mr Thomas Silberhorn, a member of Germany Parliament for the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of the Christian Democrats, said: “This is our business. My message to the US administration is: German extremists who explicitly refer to National Socialism – part of the AfD – are clearly anti the US that liberated us from National Socialism.”
The AfD and its members have a history of use of Nazi language and antisemitic 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 center-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 told a largely stony audience.
He also poured scorn on the decision in “remote Romania” to cancel a presidential election
“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 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.
He 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 Feb 13
“Over the span of a decade, we saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city,” he said.
Even before Mr Vance spoke, experts at the security conference were warning European leaders that they could be in for a fast and painful reordering of the continent’s relationship with the US.
Mr Trump’s push to negotiate directly with Russia’s president over Ukraine and his transactional approach to trade policy and military spending dominated a breakfast panel discussion hosted by the American Council on Germany and the global accounting firm KPMG.
One panelist, Dr Jana Puglierin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, said it was possible Mr Trump would build a new Euro-American alliance between parties that share core values of immigration opposition, unregulated social media speech and “anti-woke” attitudes.
The council released new polling this week that suggests that value shift has already resonated in Europe. It also found that Mr Trump’s return to the White House was most celebrated in Europe among members of several hard-right parties.
There is one, perhaps paradoxical, exception. The poll found that members of the AfD were more likely to say Mr Trump’s election would be bad for Germany than to say it would be good. NYTIMES
