“The Election Is Stolen in Berlin, Too.”
David Broder is Jacobin’s Europe editor and a historian of French and Italian communism.
Signs that the German election on 23 February would not mean a place in government for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) flustered some Italian conservatives, including in this striking headline for La Verità. The right-wing tabloid’s editor Maurizio Belpietro damned “an invisible border” — if not quite the “3.6 metre-high wall” of old — for excluding the most-supported party in former East Germany from government. Francesco Giubilei, an Italian writer and think-tank chief close to Giorgia Meloni’s government with strong ties to the American “national conservative” milieu, called on Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) to “propose a right-wing pact to the AfD instead of allying with socialists who have destroyed Germany. The points in common: freedom, ‘no green’, stop immigration.”
While Meloni did not publicly comment on the AfD’s result, her deputy prime minister and leader of the anti-immigration Lega, Matteo Salvini, called the AfD’s 21 percent “a vote for hope, for the future”. Salvini also criticized the idea of an alliance between the main centrist parties, with the Social Democrats “holding onto their seats [in cabinet] as if nothing had happened” and labelled the cordon sanitaire against the AfD doomed to fail. He suggested that his EU-wide Patriots for Europe group, which also includes Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, should seek closer relations with the AfD.
Such calls responded to a project widely speculated upon ahead of last June’s EU elections — the creation, even at the EU level, of a “union of right-wing forces” like the one that currently governs Italy. First created in 1994 when billionaire and soon-to-be prime minister Silvio Berlusconi made pacts with the Lega and the post-fascist party (today refounded as Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia), the long-term alliance among Italy’s three right-wing parties is often cited abroad as a model by anti-immigration, pro-business nationalists like France’s Marion Maréchal who are not beholden to “neither-left-nor-right” populism.
While the AfD has at times called for a referendum on quitting the EU, it foregrounds a reformulation of the Union that would restore more power to nation states.
Speaking in a radio interview just before the German election, Giubilei reckoned that the AfD is not a traditional conservative party nor similar to Italy’s ruling parties (he deemed it “post-ideological in many respects”). Nevertheless, his analysis pushed in the same direction, imagining that German coalition-making should adopt similar codes to Italy. Belpietro’s claim that the “Election Is Stolen in Berlin” nonetheless struck an odd note, seeing as Merz had already ruled out any governmental alliance with the AfD before the election, even despite the two parties’ recent joint vote for a parliamentary motion calling for tighter immigration controls.
Such positive comments on the AfD nonetheless mark a certain shift in its perception by its counterparts abroad, or at least their public treatment of it. During her victorious 2022 Italian election campaign, Meloni emphasized her “Atlanticist” foreign policy —cooperation with the Biden administration and its military support for Ukraine — and has drawn praise from outlets like the Washington Post and the London Times for her conformist moderation in this regard.
It was often by distancing itself from forces seen as soft on Vladimir Putin, mainly meaning the AfD, that Meloni’s party found its place in the camp of mainstream respectability, a line also emphasized by her Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani (head of the conservative Forza Italia party) and his European-level allies like Ursula von der Leyen and Manfred Weber. Before the June 2024 European election, both stressed that they would work only with forces who were “pro-rule of law, pro-Europe and pro-Ukraine”: yes to Meloni, no to the AfD. Even France’s Rassemblement National got in on the act, silencing its criticisms of NATO and, just ahead of last June’s EU elections, abandoning its previous alliance with the AfD. Its leaders Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella seemed to be listening to businessman Alain Minc’s suggestion to be more like Meloni: to “fall in line” with the “circle of reason” on balanced budgets and Atlanticist foreign policy.
Alternative für Europa?
So, is the anathema against the AfD now weakened, just because it scored 21 percent of the vote? Not exactly. Nicola Procaccini, who leads Meloni’s group in the European Parliament, predicted an unstable next few years in Germany because “the most cohesive alliance, the one that would have a common vision on many internal issues such as immigration, security and the economy, is almost impossible”, meaning a pact between CDU leader Merz and the AfD. Yet, while criticizing the idea of a “cordon sanitaire” and emphasising that Merz is more right-wing than his predecessor Angela Merkel, Procaccini doubted that there could be an agreement: “Dialogue with the AfD is impossible not so much in terms of personal rights, on which they are very open, but on their international positioning.” The German party’s “exaltation of today’s Putin” — the word “today’s” reminding us that Meloni had a few years ago used to praise “yesterday’s” Putin — “makes it impossible to be fellow-travellers with them.”
Italy’s Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs Edmondo Cirielli, also of Meloni’s party, posed the question slightly differently: the Christian Democrats should “institutionalize” the AfD by bringing them into government or treating them as an honourable opposition, and not pretend that their base are “6 million Nazis”. Moreover, Cirielli suggested, even when it came to the international picture, Donald Trump’s position might help overcome the conflict between different parts of the Right.
It seems that we could well get the outcome that many European leaders warn against: the collapse of the Ukrainian front or, at least, Kyiv being forced into massive territorial concessions, brokered by the Trump administration.
If European People’s Party leaders like von der Leyen have made pro-Europeanism and Atlanticism the criteria for distinguishing allies from adversaries, where does this picture stand today? Beyond Italy, in both Sweden and Finland, centre-right parties currently head national governments thanks to the support of far-right parties who have dropped their anti-NATO stances and today pose their Euroscepticism in more ambiguous terms. One of the underreported stories of the 2024 European elections, compared to 2019 or 2014, was that parties openly calling for their countries to quit the EU seemed to disappear almost everywhere.
While the AfD has at times called for a referendum on quitting the EU, it foregrounds a reformulation of the Union that would restore more power to nation states: a “European Economic and Interest Community” rather than a federal union. Those familiar with the use of such vague promises by far-right parties once they approach high office — the 2024 Fratelli d’Italia manifesto, written once Meloni was already one of the main players in EU politics, hysterically cast the election as a choice between a “Soviet-style superstate” or else moving toward a “confederal Europe” of “strong nations” — may wonder how much this is really the condition of the AfD ever entering government. Still, it is quite clear that given Germany’s central role in the bloc, the AfD has more disruptive potential than its Italian counterparts.
Less Green, More Guns
On Germany’s election night, Merz spoke of a Europe at “five minutes to midnight”, making it necessary to “strengthen Europe as quickly as possible, so that we achieve independence from the US”. Most commentary framed this in terms of increased defence spending, and the prospect that the next German government will remove the constitutional “debt brake” in order to boost defence spending. US military aid to Ukraine was in question, but also Washington’s political solidarity with its European partners. The previous week, US Vice President JD Vance’s provocative intervention at the Munich Security Conference, suggesting that European states were trampling free speech and could no longer rely on the US to defend them, included a marked criticism of the so-called “firewall” blocking the AfD from government.
The party is almost universally cast as a block in the way of German rearmament — an image especially driven by its opposition to arms shipments to Kyiv, call to drop sanctions on Russia, and emphasis on German energy bills rather than Ukrainian defence. It seems likely to make its policy on the debt brake conditional on these issues, in order to continue harvesting discontent with the government. Still, already in 2017 the party had called for a strengthening of the European component of NATO (albeit subordinated to the “German interest”), and its 2025 manifesto emphasized NATO’s importance until the hoped-for creation of an “independent and effective European military alliance”. Focus on an “interest-based” foreign policy and better relations with Russia and China clearly signals disquiet with liberal internationalism, and the call for peace looms large in AfD campaigning. It is less clear that this translates into an on-principle hostility to increased military spending.
Trump’s moves to break off aid to Kyiv — and the apparently weak chance of Ukraine continuing its fight backed by EU powers alone — could reshuffle the terms of the problem. It seems that we could well get the outcome that many European leaders warn against: the collapse of the Ukrainian front or, at least, Kyiv being forced into massive territorial concessions, brokered by the Trump administration. Yet, even if this happens and the fighting halts, we may also get — belatedly — these same leaders’ proposed solution, namely a drastic rise in European defence spending.
For far-right forces who are already in government, a military retooling of Europe is surely an attractive prospect.
It may not be the increase to 5 percent of GDP (well over triple current European levels) of which Trump has spoken. But with NATO-member governments across Europe promising steep rises in cash for the military — from the Baltic States to new NATO members in Scandinavia, not to mention Britain’s Labour government (promising to reallocate funds from international development spending) — the trend has been set.
This leaves open other questions, however: will Europeans buy from US suppliers, or will EU states build new production capacity, as former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi’s recent competitiveness report suggested? Can this rely on EU funding and collective borrowing, or will this project be brought down by penny-pinching nationalists in the wealthier member-states? After all, the AfD was itself founded by opponents of collective European borrowing. And does strengthening the European wing of NATO mean creating a genuinely EU Army, or merely boosting existing national armies and their coordination?
This surely brings into play wider questions of federalism and national autonomy. Yet perhaps this issue is not best understood as a zero-sum game between net budget contributors and recipients, or according to the political logic of questions like the European Green Deal, where far-right parties generally oppose the EU’s 1-trillion-euro spending plans. If anything, Trump’s push for European states to spend more on defence offers an opening for an overlapping of interests — despite their different stances on Ukraine — between the most liberal-internationalist forces, with their call for greater European strategic autonomy, and nationalist parties who also see the benefits of military Keynesianism, including at the level of reindustrialization.
Even parties who opposed the Green Deal, and those (like the AfD, or Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party in the Netherlands) who claimed that the post-2008-crisis era EU was squandering taxpayers’ money to support welfare systems in Southern Europe, may take a rather different approach to collective borrowing for specifically military purposes. Take France’s Rassemblement National, which before the 2022 presidential election called for French defence spending to rise from €41 to €55 billion. Party president Bardella recently issued an open letter calling for a union of right-wing forces across the EU to scrap the Green Deal and give breathing room for businesses. Retooling military-production capacity may provide a far more useful ideological banner for securing broad right-wing agreement for European-level borrowing, without this apparent “federalism” thereby applying to all issues or even meaning the creation of an EU army.
Changing Times
The AfD’s posture as a “peace party” and common media references to it as “pro-Kremlin” reflect the importance of its positions on Ukraine to its electoral appeal. There are parts of the Right, Trump included, who seek to pivot to better relations with Russia in order to focus on confronting China. The AfD instead speaks of improving relations with Beijing, putting German trade first.
But these stances, or even this party’s free-marketeer edge and libertarian, Milei-esque elements should not be confused for a blanket opposition to state interventionism and spending, least of all on the army. Its 2025 manifesto instead expressed its fulsome admiration for the German army and its “best traditions”. This did not stop at a rhetorical celebration of German “military songs and customs” or the “public display of military attitudes and virtues”, but included a call for the restoration of compulsory national service and a major expansion of Germany’s own military spending.
While at January’s AfD congress, co-leader Tino Chrupalla wanted to abandon the party’s pro-conscription stance, 70 percent of delegates voted to keep it. Hence, in its manifesto we read “The German armed forces are not capable of defence. With the ‘Zeitenwende‘ proclaimed [by Olaf Scholz] in February 2022, this was also recognized by the federal government. Nevertheless, the necessary measures for the reconstruction of the Bundeswehr are still lacking. Due to chronic underfunding over decades, as well as the ongoing transfer of operational material and weapons systems from Bundeswehr stocks to Ukraine and the constant strain on the troops due to the training of Ukrainian soldiers, the German armed forces are in a desolate state.“ The solution: cut aid to Ukraine, boost the funding and operational preparedness of the German Army.
For far-right forces who are already in government, most notably Fratelli d’Italia, a military retooling of Europe is surely an attractive prospect, not least given the waning of the post-COVID recovery funds that were so important to Italy’s recent years of modest economic growth. They speak of boosting Europe’s armies, and are more sceptical about an EU army. Yet, given her integration into the bloc’s leadership, it is well-past time that analysts abandon the attempt to cast Meloni as “isolated in Europe” or the bearer of a general “Euroscepticism” amounting to a blanket opposition to EU-level initiatives. Her party, like many of its European counterparts, favours selective decoupling on some issues (notably the green agenda), while seeking greater integration in others.
As a rule, once Brexit-sympathizing forces like Fratelli d’Italia or Wilders’ Freedom Party now talk about changing Europe itself — or, as Bardella put it, no longer need to consider quitting, since “you don’t walk away from the table when you’re about to win.” Instead, the far right is in some senses taking the initiative, as we see in von der Leyen’s sponsorship of the Italian premier’s plans for offshoring border policing to various non-EU states in North Africa and Albania, now imitated even by soft-left parties. Even parties of an obviously nationalist bent can propose actions to be taken by the EU in the name of European solidarity, thereby emphasizing the exclusivist element of Europeanness rather than its imagined connection to enlightened cosmopolitanism.
Even parties that have often railed against bureaucrats in Brussels make an exception when it comes to building European military cooperation.
From 2022, Meloni and co. used their alignment to Biden’s foreign policy, on everything from Ukraine to Israel, as a key part of their message of stable and competent leadership. This surely comforted Italian centrists, who have largely held her government to account in terms of its international positioning. Meloni moreover won plaudits in Washington for squashing dissident stances both from other right-wingers and from pacifist critics.
But the Trump administration’s arrival has changed the terms of the issue. US tariffs on EU imports could hit economies like Italy’s regardless of the ideological affinities and “culture war” positions shared between the current heads of government in Rome and Washington. Moreover, the attempt, beloved of many liberals, to distinguish between “Atlanticist” and “pro-Russian” parts of the far right is clearly troubled by the Trump administration. Even some of its most prominent officials (Elon Musk, JD Vance, to some degree Marco Rubio) have collapsed the distinction, scolding European conservatives who anathemize the AfD.
There surely are some European partisans of a more active EU role in the Ukraine war — Emmanuel Macron in the lead, with calls to send European troops — and others who are blunt that the US will play the leading role in reaching a deal — notably Meloni. The Italian premier’s position, including after the public row between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Trump on Friday, has been to insist that EU leaders need better dialogue with the US president. Yet, given Europe’s objective lack of leadership in shaping the conflict’s outcome, it is unclear that this range of positions on a peace deal imposed above Europeans’ heads will amount to a permanent chasm in EU politics, well-able to define the distinction between the bloc’s hegemonic camp and those others who can easily be dismissed as Kremlin-supporting extremists.
Positions on Ukraine surely do divide the Christian Democrats and AfD. Given the likely formation of a coalition of centrist parties, we can imagine that in opposition the German far right will cause trouble over any issue it can, and its efforts to distinguish itself as a “peace party” may well see it resist attempts to lift the debt brake. But the idea that Europe is forced finally to stand on its own two feet as the US government scales down its post-1945 military commitment to the continent ought not too hastily be presented as a reinvigoration of liberal-internationalist values, imagined as a bulwark against Europe’s own far-right and Trumpian parties.
Attempts at a European Defence Community in the 1950s were felled in the French parliament, opposed both by Communists who rejected its Cold Warrior logic and by the Gaullist assertion of French autonomy. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations had sought a Europe that would take its own defence in hand, under Washington’s guidance. At the time, Charles de Gaulle insisted that for a European army to exist, “Europe” must first exist as a “political, economic, financial, administrative and, above all, moral reality”, one with the loyalty of its subjects, “if necessary, one that millions would die for.”
The EU in 2025 clearly has not met this standard. But even parties that have often railed against bureaucrats in Brussels make an exception when it comes to building European military cooperation. In the words of Procaccini, “We’ve always thought that the European Union should not concern itself with everything, but with just a few important things. The common defence of European borders and interests is one of the few things for which the EU is useful — and how!”