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The American vice-president visited a concentration camp Thursday afternoon. He posed a crown at the foot of a statue, made the sign of the cross and stopped in front of a commemorative wall where in several languages, including German and English, the words “Never Again” have been written.
JD Vance told journalists he had read on the Holocaust in books, but that his “unspeakable” had been taken to the house by his trip to Dachau, where more than 30,000 people died in the hands of the Nazis . “This is something that I will never forget, and I am grateful to have seen him closely in person,” said Mr. Vance.
But after Mr. Vance spoke to Munich the next day, the German leaders actually wondered if he had understood what he had just seen.
Eighty years after the American soldiers released Dachau, the best German officials this weekend, but accused Mr. Vance – and by extension, President Trump – of stimulating a political party that many Germans consider to be dangerously from Nazism.
This celebration, called the alternative for Germany, or AFD, is second in the ballot boxes for the legislative elections next Sunday, with around 20% of the public saying that they support it. But no other German party is willing to govern with him. This is because AFD has sometimes minimized the atrocities of Hitler. Some members of the party have renounced Nazi slogans.
German intelligence agencies have classified AFD parts as extremists. The members were arrested as part of several plots to overthrow the government. Some would have assisted a rally last year which included discussions on the expulsion not only asylum seekers, but German citizens who immigrated to the country.
“A commitment to” Never Again “cannot be reconciled with the support of AFD,” said Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Munich on Saturday morning, as part of a long reprimand by Mr. Vance.
“This” never again “is the historic mission that Germany as a free democracy must and wants to continue to be up to everyday,” he said. “Never again fascism, racism never again, never the war of aggression again.”
Decades of German law and political practice have turned around the belief that to prevent another Hitler from coming to power, the government must prohibit hate speeches and avoid political parties deemed extreme. The nation has an office for the protection of the constitution, with intelligence tools to monitor extremists and a constitutional court which, in rare cases, can completely prohibit the parties.
Mr. Vance, like another Trump administration official, Elon Musk, parachuted in the country’s legislative elections, criticizing this approach. The two men say it’s time for the Germans to stop police speech and start treating the country’s hard flank like the avatars of voters deprived of their rights who share Mr. Trump’s opposition to immigration on a large scale.
Mr. Musk publicly approved AFD, telling the members of the party last month that the Germans “too much emphasized past guilt”.
The prescriptions of musk and vance perhaps total the most verboten message of traditional German policy – have made the country all the more surprising that the Germans have long thanked for having ended a deeply shameful period in their history .
A writer from Der Spiegel, a first German newspaper, said on Saturday morning that Mr. Vance had Given AFD a “Wahlkampfgeschen” – German for “Campaign Gift”.
Even before the speech, analysts of the Munich conference warned that the vision of the world of administration would upset the alliances on both sides of the Atlantic.
“We have an American government which has different values and a different vision of what the West should be,” Jana Puglierin, a main person on the European Berlin Foreign Relations on Friday, should be.
In his speech, Mr. Vance described the restrictions of Europe of speech a greater threat than the military attack of Russia or China, comparing them to those imposed by the Soviet Union of the Cold War.
“I turn to Brussels,” said Mr. Vance, “where the commissioners of the EU commission warn citizens that they intend to close social media during the period of civilian troubles when they spot What they judge as a hateful content ”, or that very country, where the police made raids against citizens suspected of having published online anti-feminist comments as part of the “fight against misogyny ”.
Intentionally or not, Mr. Vance’s speech landed in the midst of a pair of controversial political debates. Europe is currently struggling with questions about how to manage the right -wing hard parties that have acquired electoral actions. In some countries, such as Austria and the Netherlands, these parties have joined federal governments. In others, like France and Germany, traditional parties have blocked them – so far.
Despite this, certain lines are vague: the main candidate for the Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, aroused conviction last month for having pushed a set of migration restrictions in Parliament who would need AFD votes to pass, a move considered taboo. Mr. Merz defended the decision but said that he would never allow AFD to officially join a government with his Christian Democrats.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comments on the criticism of the Germans with regard to Mr. Vance.
Germany has also had a long -standing debate on the scope of its laws of speech, more recently inflamed by the war in Gaza. The restrictions prohibit anti -Semitic discourse, but some Germans – including in the artistic community of Berlin – complained that they were too largely defined and that they effectively prohibit any criticism of Israel or his conduct in the war.
Two factors that overlap seem to lead Mr. Musk and Mr. Vance to their German incursions.
One is an attempt to forge new transatlantic alliances between parties that share the fundamental values of Mr. Trump, in particular an opposition hard to mass migration.
The other is an effort to sweep the laws and social norms in Europe against discourse, online or otherwise, that governments deem hateful or “disinformation”, but that conservatives say that their political opinions are suppressed. Mr. Musk denounced these restrictions as assault against freedom. He amplified such a discourse on his social media platform, X.
AFD has climbed into polls in the last decade on the strength of promising difficult restrictions on the millions of asylum seekers who have flowed in Germany since the Middle East and elsewhere, including promised deportations. His Chancellor candidate, Alice Weidel, accused officials of the German and European Censorship Union. She met Mr. Vance on the sidelines of Munich.
Ms. Weidel has filed complaints similar to those of Mr. Vance, paradoxically enough in the context of a continuous effort to keep AFD from the Nazis and to launch traditional parties as the real threat to the country.
“What Adolf Hitler did,” she told Mr. Musk in an interview last month, “the first thing-he disabled freedom of expression. He therefore controls the media. Without that, He would never have succeeded.
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