Trump administration emerges as a staunch defender of Germany's far-right AfD

CNBC

3 days ago

President Donald Trump's administration has emerged as a staunch defender of Alternative for Germany, a political party with Nazi echoes that has risen in popularity — and that German intelligence officials recently classified as a "proven right-wing extremist organization."
The party is known by its German initialism, AfD, and it has included leaders who have embraced old Nazi slogans and minimized the atrocities of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.
Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have criticized the German government's efforts to isolate and investigate AfD, arguing that such actions amount to undemocratic persecution of a rival political group.
"It's one thing to say that a particular set of views is gross ... or somehow outside the Overton window, outside the bounds of reasonable discourse," Vance said in an interview last week in Rome, where he attended Pope Leo XIV's inaugural Mass. "I think that it is very, very dangerous to use the neutral institutions of state — the military, the police forces ... the intel services — to try to delegitimize another competing political party. I think that's especially true when that political party just got second in an election and is, depending on which poll you believe, either the [most] popular or the second-most popular party."
Meanwhile, billionaire Elon Musk, a Trump confidant who has wielded significant White House power, has gone further than Vance and Rubio, having campaigned with AfD ahead of elections in February, when the party finished in second place and further established its popularity.
"Only the AfD can save Germany," Musk posted on X, his social media site, in December.
The Rubio-led State Department reinforced the Trump administration's line Tuesday.
In a post on Substack, Samuel Samson, a senior adviser in the department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, wrote that the German government "has established elaborate systems to monitor and censor online speech under the guise of combating disinformation and preventing offense."
Samson specifically cited the recent decision to label AfD as extremist. He also raised concerns about the treatment of far-right parties and leaders in other European countries, including Marine Le Pen, whose recent embezzlement conviction in France could prevent her from running for president in a 2027 race she had been favored to win.
"Americans are familiar with these tactics. Indeed, a similar strategy of censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization was utilized against President Trump and his supporters," Samson wrote. "What this reveals is that the global liberal project is not enabling the flourishing of democracy. Rather, it is trampling democracy, and Western heritage along with it, in the name of a decadent governing class afraid of its own people."
Samson added that "Europe's democratic backsliding not only impacts European citizens but increasingly affects American security and economic ties, along with the free speech rights of American citizens and companies."
"Our hope," he continued, "is that both Europe and the United States can recommit to our Western heritage, and that European nations will end the weaponization of government against those seeking to defend it."
Vance emphasized similar themes in a speech in February at the Munich Security Conference, where he chastised German leaders for, among other things, refusing to include AfD in the country's governing coalition despite its electoral gains. While he was in Germany, Vance met with Friedrich Merz, now the chancellor, and with Alice Weidel, a co-chair of the AfD.
An AfD spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. The party has long denied the charge that it is an extremist group, and it sued Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution over the intelligence agency's recent classification. A spokesperson for the agency, citing the lawsuit, declined to comment.
During last week's interview, Vance emphasized that he has not endorsed AfD or encouraged Germans to support it. He described his and Rubio's advocacy as a matter of democratic principles.
Trump's first campaign for president in 2016 fed on chants by his supporters to "lock her up!" — a reference to his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, who had not been charged with any crime. More recently, he and his allies accused former President Joe Biden, who beat Trump in his 2020 re-election bid, of weaponizing the Justice Department against Trump and other Republicans.
The Trump administration launched an investigation this month of former FBI Director James Comey, a Trump critic who had shared on social media a photo of seashells arranged to spell out "8647."
Trump allies interpreted the message as an assassination threat, noting that "86" can be a slang term for getting rid of something and that Trump is the 47th president. Trump's director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has called for Comey to be imprisoned over the post. But the number 86 does not always have violent connotations; it's use in the hospitality industry can refer to removing or refusing service to a customer.
Asked how his and Rubio's concerns square with such Trump administration actions and rhetoric, Vance argued that there is a "reasonable" question about whether Comey had advocated for Trump's assassination.
"I'm a pretty big believer in free speech," Vance said. "But I don't think that saying you should kill Donald Trump is an acceptable part of public debate. Everybody's going to draw their line. I think where I draw the line is encouraging violence against political opponents. If there's a determination that Comey encouraged violence against a political opponent, then that's a problem. And if there's a determination that he didn't, then that's a different question."
While Vance has not endorsed AfD, he described a pro-AfD piece Musk wrote in December as "interesting."
"Also interesting; American media slanders AfD as Nazi-lite," Vance wrote in his Jan. 2 social media post that called attention to Musk's piece. "But AfD is most popular in the same areas of Germany that were most resistant to the Nazis."
AfD was founded in 2013, its early messaging geared toward anti-European Union voters. In subsequent years, the party became known for its strident anti-immigrant rhetoric. In 2017, an AfD ad criticized as Islamophobic asked: "Burkas? We prefer bikinis." Another, featuring the image of a pregnant woman, asked: "New Germans? We'll make them ourselves."
The party has grown in popularity, coinciding with a rise of right-wing voter sentiment across the United States and Europe. Last year, AfD became the first far-right party to win a state election in Germany since the Nazis.
Meanwhile, links and comparisons between AfD and the Nazis have been inescapable.
At an AfD rally in 2017, attendees chanted that they would "build a subway" to Auschwitz for their political opponents. A founding AfD member, Alexander Gauland, once described the Nazi era as a mere "speck" of bird excrement in German history. A party leader, Björne Höcke, has twice been found guilty by a German court of purposefully employing Nazi rhetoric. (He has appealed the rulings.) Another AfD politician, Maximilian Krah, resigned his party leadership post under pressure and suspended campaign activities last year after he said the SS, the Nazis' main paramilitary force, were "not all criminals."
When Musk appeared virtually at an AfD campaign event in January, he leaned into a talking point consistent with the party's desire to move beyond the guilt over Nazi-era atrocities, lamenting that "there is too much focus on past guilt." The same week, Musk faced criticism after he offered a gesture many found similar to a Nazi salute at a Trump rally in Washington.
In its designation of AfD as an extremist organization on May 2, the German intelligence agency asserted that the party "aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society." AfD also does not consider German nationals with histories of migration from Muslim countries as equal to German people, the agency added at the time.
The report drew a quick rebuke from Rubio, who is also Trump's national security adviser.
"Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition," Rubio wrote on X. "That's not democracy — it's tyranny in disguise."
Vance then piggybacked on Rubio's post with a Cold War analogy.
"The AfD is the most popular party in Germany, and by far the most representative of East Germany. Now the bureaucrats try to destroy it," he wrote. "The West tore down the Berlin Wall together. And it has been rebuilt — not by the Soviets or the Russians, but by the German establishment."
Vance contended in last week's interview that holding down a rival political party because of its beliefs allows its beliefs to "take on an almost mystical power" by removing them from the public dialogue.
"I don't like Nazism, and I don't like people who are sympathetic with Nazis," Vance said. "But I think the way to beat back against it is to debate it and defeat it and not believe that you can, kind of, like, bury this thing underground, because you can't."