The populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has officially condemned the European Union as a “failed project” in a text adopted at the party’s conference over the weekend.
The AfD, which has surged to one of the most popular parties in Germany, overtaking leftist Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, has said that the globalist institution of the European Union is ultimately at fault for many of the ills befalling the continent, particularly on issues of mass migration.
In a text adopted by delegates at a party conference in Magdeburg, the AfD said that the EU is a “failed project” and that leadership in Brussels have “completely failed on issues such as mass migration and the green energy agenda. The party went on to say that it opposes maintaining the Euro as the currency in Germany, public broadcaster DW reported.
“Our idea of Europe is clear: sovereign nation-states instead of EU superstate and debt union, free citizens instead of protection and bureaucratic incarceration. And peoples living together in peace and respect on our continent,” the populist party said on social media.
The AfD did not go as far as to call for Germany to leave the EU as the UK did with Brexit, nor did it call for the dissolution of the bloc entirely, but rather for member states to reclaim their power and scale back the authority granted by them to bureaucrats in Brussels.
They argue for “a federation of European nations, a new European economic and interest community that preserves the sovereignty of member states.”
While the party previously called for leaving the EU, it now states that it believes that limited functions of the bloc should be maintained, including the free trade single market throughout member states, the protection of borders against illegal immigration, and a strategically autonomous foreign policy stance in order to not become beholden to the international objectives of globalists in Washington, most notably of late for the party, the support for Ukraine against the Russians.
“Based on these pillars, the member states can autonomously and flexibly conclude functional bilateral or multilateral agreements according to their needs,” the AfD argued.
The conference in Magdeburg comes amid a surge in popularity for the AfD, with the party now polling at 23 per cent support among the public, a record high for the populist party.
The rise of the AfD has come amid continued waves of mass migration, as well as an energy and cost of living crisis, which were not only orchestrated by the current leftist coalition government of Olaf Scholz but also, and perhaps more importantly, under the over decade in power that former Chancellor Angela Merkel and her supposedly centre-right Christian Democrat Union (CDU) enjoyed until 2021.
Yet, the rise has also come with a major pushback in the legacy media, which warns of the rise of the so-called “far-right”.
The establishment in Berlin has also been riled by their rise, with the government-funded, anti-racist organisation, the German Institute for Human Rights (DIMR) arguing that the AfD could be banned outright for violating the country’s constitution. The DIMR argued, without irony, that the government could ban the AfD as a political party because it is allegedly against the “free democratic basic order” of the country. It went on to allege that the party “aims to abolish the guarantee of human dignity enshrined in Article 1 Paragraph 1 of the Basic Law.”
In the wake of the party conference, this criticism was seconded by the head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, who has previously linked the increased popularity of the AfD to a rise in extremism in the country.
Haldenwang argued as evidence of the party’s alleged opposition to “human dignity”, that AfD speakers in Magdeburg had referenced the “Great Replacement“, which posits that elites in Western society, who view people merely as indespensible and interchangeable beings, are using mass migration to impoverish and disempower native populations.
“Such statements provide evidence that the guarantee of human dignity of the Basic Law for certain population groups is being questioned here,” Haldenwang said.