U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance has called for Germany’s establishment parties to reconsider their policy of shutting out the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Vance said, “I think, unfortunately, the will of voters has been ignored by a lot of our European friends.”
“It’s really about censorship and about migration, about this fear that President Trump and I have, that European leaders are kind of terrified of their own people,” the Vice President explained to the press ahead of his address to the conference.
Vance struck a similar tone when turning to the question of supposed Russian influence over the European political discourse, saying, “If your democratic society can be taken down by $200,000 of social media ads, then you should think seriously about how strong your grip on or how strong your understanding of the will of the people actually is.”
The AfD is currently the second-most popular party in Germany, projected to place ahead of the governing Social Democrats and their current and former coalition partners in the Green and Free Democratic parties. It will likely place behind the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a notionally right-wing party that occasionally indulges in anti-mass migration rhetoric but was formerly led by Angela Merkel, who opened Germany to millions of Middle Eastern migrants.
Elon Musk, the tech mogul leading the Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE) for the Trump administration, has previously endorsed the AfD, calling it the only party that can save Germany.