In a speech in Munich, Vice President J.D. Vance scolded European leaders for boycotting populist parties, and said German politicians should abandon their policy of maintaining a “firewall” against the far-right.
Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference on Friday was greeted with murmurs from the audience and backlash from German officials. It comes as the country’s far-right party, Alternative for Germany, is polling second ahead of national elections next week. The country’s center-right and center-left parties have long refused to work with the party, known as AfD.
“What German democracy — what no democracy, American, German or European — will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered,” Vance said. “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls.”
Vance never directly mentioned AfD in his speech, which came one day after he visited the site of Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp, alongside a Holocaust survivor.
But the theme of the address was taking European leaders to task for what he called antidemocratic practices, including suppressing speech and refusing to work with populist politicians.
“The organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations,” Vance said. “Now, again, we don’t have to agree with everything or anything that people say. But when people represent, when political leaders represent, an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them.”
AfD’s rise has alarmed many Jews in Germany who say the party’s rhetoric resembles that used in the lead-up to the Holocaust. Some of the party’s most extreme representatives have belittled the Holocaust, saying that Germany has paid enough penance for the sins of an older generation. AfD also drew protests last year amid revelations that it held a secret meeting at a lakeside villa to discuss plans to deport foreigners, including those who had become German citizens. Prominent neo-Nazis attended the meeting, according to the news organization that broke the story, inducing painful echoes of the gathering of Nazi leaders at nearby Wannsee in 1942 to devise a plan to deport and then murder Jews.
Vance championed AfD’s central issue, opposing migration to Europe. His remarks echoed his seeming defense of AfD’s policies in December, when he wrote a post on X pushing back against criticism of the party’s policies.
“Of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration,” Vance said on Saturday. “No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants… More and more, all over Europe, they’re voting for political leaders who promised to put an end to out-of-control migration.”
He also defended comments made by Elon Musk, the multibillionaire and top Trump adviser who has endorsed AfD and spoke at one of its rallies.
“Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference, even when people express views outside your own country and even when those people are very influential,” Vance said. “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
Vance’s words were met with criticism from German leaders.
“I don’t think it is right for foreigners, including those from friendly foreign countries, to interfere so intensively in an election campaign in the middle of an election period,” a government spokesperson said, according to Reuters. The German defense minister called Vance’s criticism of European democracy “unacceptable.”
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