Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) announced on Monday (29 January) that it would soon hold talks with Marine Le Pen, while the figurehead of the National Rally (RN) recently distanced itself from the Array, of which it is an ally. at European level.
According to an investigation published Wednesday January 10 by the German investigative site Correctiv, several officials from the German far-right party met, in the presence of party donors and members of the neo-Nazi movement, in a hotel in Potsdam, the November 25, 2023, to discuss a planned large-scale expulsion of Germans of foreign origin.
After these revelations, Marine Le Pen said she was ready, during her wishes to the press, to break with the AfD, saying she “totally disagreed with the proposal that would have been discussed or would have been decided within the framework” of this secret meeting.
The aim of the negotiations is to “rectify reality”, AfD MP Bernd Baumann said from Berlin on Monday. “We think it’s a false impression . . . which we hope to explain soon,” a spokesman for Maximilian Krah, a member of the European Parliament, told Agence France-Presse.
The distancing displayed by Marine Le Pen was considered all the more surprising given that in the European Parliament, the National Rally (RN) and the AfD are allied and sit in the same group – Identity and Democracy (ID) – where they have 18 and 10 seats respectively, out of 63 members. The German ally currently seems all the more essential to the RN as it receives more than 20% of voting intentions in the European elections.
According to Baumann, Le Pen made her statements “based on press articles that she knew” and which, according to him, were “totally false in their tone. “Terms such as “deportation” and “mass expulsion” were not used at the meeting, he said. Baumann, for whom these are erroneous attributions on the part of Correctiv and a giant component of the press.
The revelation of the assembly shocked all of Germany. It led to a large mobilization in the streets of civil society aimed at denouncing the risks to democracy posed by the AfD, a party firmly established in the German political landscape since its accession to the Bundestag in 2017.
More than 800,000 people took to the streets over the weekend of Jan. 27 and 28, in addition to Hamburg and Düsseldorf, organizers said. Last weekend, organizers estimated the number of participants at 1. 4 million.
In the wake of this mobilization, the AfD suffered an electoral setback on Sunday, squandering its bid to win a second cantonal presidency in local elections in the Saale-Orla district of East Germany’s Thuringia region. Its candidate, Uwe Thrume, won just 47. 6% of the vote in Sunday’s runoff, his first-round score was just 1. 9 points, while his conservative rival enjoyed a strong vote surplus to finish with 52. 4%.
The defeat of the AfD, the favorite party, was achieved “thanks to the mobilization of civil society,” said the number two in the Thuringia region, social democrat Georg Maier.