German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has rejected “outside” interference in the country’s elections, insisting that Germans would decide their democracy for themselves, as he hit back at comments made by US Vice President JD Vance the day before.
Vance delivered a scathing speech at the Munich Security Conference on Friday, in which he turned on European allies and accused them of suppressing free speech, losing control of immigration and refusing to work with hard-right parties in government.
The audience had been expecting to hear about the Trump administration’s plans to end the war in Ukraine, but instead faced a lecture from Vance, who told European leaders that the biggest threat to their security was “from within.”
Following his speech, Vance met with Alternative for Germany (AfD) co-leader Alice Weidel at the sidelines of the conference, according to a spokesperson for Weidel.
They met in a hotel room for about 30 minutes and spoke about the Ukraine war and German politics, the spokesperson said. The hard-right, anti-immigration party is surging in polls ahead of elections next week.
Standing on the same stage as Vance Saturday, Scholz rejected the vice president’s comments and insisted that Germany would not accept foreign interference in its domestic politics.
“A commitment to ‘never again’ cannot be reconciled with support for the AfD,” Scholz told audiences in the Bavarian capital.
“We will not accept outsiders intervening in our democracy, in our elections, in the democratic formation of opinion in favour of this party,” he continued, adding that that should especially not happen “among friends and allies.”
Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party, as well as Germany’s other mainstream parties, have ruled out working with the AfD, in a stance which has become known as a “firewall.”
Also during his speech, Scholz predicted that the future Berlin government would ease the country’s so-called debt brake, in order to spend more on defense and security. Germany’s debt brake is a constitutional article that prevents the government from borrowing excessively and amassing debt.
Germany’s government last month said it had met NATO’s target to spend 2% of its GDP on defense– this however falls significantly short of the Trump administration’s fresh demand of 5%.