Last week, Vice President J.D. Vance met with Alternative for Germany (AfD) co-chair Alice Weidel, a political leader in that party who has downplayed the significance of the Holocaust and whose party has been described by many as a neo-Nazi organization.
The meeting took place while Vance visited the country, where he also spoke at a security conference taking place in Munich, issuing demands for other countries to be more open to far right political movements.
AfD is designated as a “suspected extremist” organization by Germany’s government. The party is vehemently anti-immigration, particularly toward Muslim people. Its leaders have also espoused antisemitic viewpoints and have downplayed or outright denied the Holocaust.
Weidel is among them. Recently, she has complained about the Holocaust being “politically instrumentalized” against her political party. She also described efforts to maintain the educational history of Holocaust as “pesky,” and visibly rolled her eyes at discussion of the historical event that involved the mass killing of millions of people by the Nazi regime.
At the meeting between Vance and Weidel, the two discussed the war between Russia and Ukraine, German domestic policies, and also restrictions within the country against ultra-nationalist political parties being able to take part in elections. Vance also met with other political leaders in Germany, but his meeting with a member of the AfD is notable because of how far to the right the party is — and how giving them attention could be an attempt by the Trump administration to legitimize them.
Although AfD is currently polling in second place for a nationwide election scheduled for later this month, all of the other major political parties in Germany have agreed not to form a new coalition government with the far right group.
Vance is the second major figure in the Trump administration to have interacted directly with AfD. Elon Musk, head of the White House’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” has also spoken fondly of AfD, endorsing the neo-Nazi party and speaking at one of their rallies late in January — just days after he was accused of performing a Nazi salute multiple times during one of Trump’s inauguration festivities.
Vance has also been criticized for the speech he gave in Munich last week, in which he chastised Germany and other European nations for purportedly being against free speech. Many of the statements Vance made within that speech were hypocritical, as he complained about actions supposedly taken by governments to quell free speech or a free press that President Donald Trump or the Trump administration have taken in the past.
Vance, for example, chided a recent judicial decision in Romania to annul the first round of a presidential election, which resulted in a far right candidate, Călin Georgescu, advancing with the most votes. The judge in that case came to that decision from evidence showing Georgescu had benefited immensely from a mass influence campaign orchestrated by Russian actors.
“When we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard,” Vance said in his speech — ignoring the fact that Trump himself had tried to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election and had made multiple threats to do it again if he lost the 2024 race.
Vance also tried to suggest that European countries were infringing on individuals’ speech rights, asserting that the Trump administration was the epitome of defending such freedoms.
“In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square,” Vance said.
Again, the vice president’s claim here ignores Trump’s storied antagonistic relationship with the free press in the United States, where he has constantly called for news media to lose their “licenses” over reporting about him that he disliked. More recently, the Trump White House has refused to allow reporters from The Associated Press (AP) to attend news events involving the president over AP’s decision to continue calling the body of water south of the U.S., the Gulf of Mexico, instead of the administration-approved moniker, “the Gulf of America.”
Further, in his first campaign for president (and indeed in his campaign in 2024), Trump repeatedly admonished his political opponents, hinting he would use the Department of Justice (DOJ) to punish them. Trump also infamously led chants of “lock her up” against 2016 Democratic candidate for president Hillary Clinton. Despite that history, Vance still promulgated the myth that he and Trump abided by the ideal that, in the U.S., “you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail.”
After Vance’s speech, current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz blasted him for effectively propping up far right political movements in Europe.
“I expressly reject what US Vice President Vance said at the Munich Security Conference,” Scholz said in a social media post, advocating for a continued “firewall against extreme right-wing parties.”
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