Germany's far right calls for expulsion of US troops
As Europe's centre right and far right join forces, the only thing left separating them is support for Trump's America. But it's the centre appeasing Trump, while the far right opposes his aggression.
Last week, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s centre-right European Peoples Party (EPP) used the new right-wing majority in the EU Parliament to pass the harshest crackdown on immigration the EU has ever seen. The Return Regulation will allow countries to send migrants who have had their asylum claims rejected to third-country ‘return hub’ camps through bilateral agreements, end their right to remain while they appeal, allow families to be sent to detention centres, and allow returns to be coordinated with governing entities that are not internationally recognised (the Taliban in Afghanistan). It would also allocate huge budgetary resources to fighting illegal migration.
“We are moving from laws and procedures to total closure, with the militarisation of migration policy: emergency declarations, paramilitary groups, economic warfare and massive defence-like spending,” argued migration researcher Thomas Huddleston in The Brussels Times last week.
Whatever you think of the law (personally I think some elements within it are needed to close loopholes that were proving dangerous), for the purposes of this article what is more interesting is the method that was used to pass it. Rather than being open to softening the law through compromise with the Parliament’s centre-left (with whom they were, until recently, in a governing majority alliance for decades) the EPP chose to maintain a hard-line version of the law by working with the Parliament’s far right: the ECR group of Giorgia Meloni, the Patriots (PfE) group of Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orban, and the Sovereign Nations (ESN) group of Alice Weidel.
This is nothing new, as the EPP has been increasingly using this so-called “Venezuela majority” since voters voted in the majority for the right in the 2024 EU election. Nevertheless, the party that dominates the EPP - the German Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) of von der Leyen and Chancellor Friedrich Merz - has been insisting at home in Berlin that they have a ‘cordon sanitaire’ against the far right. This resulted in scandal earlier this month when Germans learned to their astonishment that politics exists outside Germany. It was revealed that the EPP has set up a Whatsapp group to coordinate with the far right, including the Alternative for Germany (AfD), in Brussels. Merz tried to throw EPP leader Manfred Weber under the by saying he “bears responsibility”. The German Chancellor is shocked, just shocked, that gambling is going on here. Never mind that the instructions for this far right cooperation are coming directly from both Berlin and the Berlaymont.
But on the same day that the centre and far right teamed up on the migration vote last week, on another vote they conspicuously diverged: the ratification of President von der Leyen’s ‘surrender deal’ with Trump. As I wrote last week, the far-right PfE and ESN groups voted against or abstained in that vote, and the EPP had to rely on its old centrist alliance with the centre left, Liberals and Greens to pass it. It is only the latest example of the far right condemning American aggression and extortion while the centre excuses it. And this subject is now the biggest area of daylight between the EPP/ECR and the PfE/ESN.
While centrists appease Trump, the far right stands for sovereignty
Yesterday, at a rally in the Eastern German state of Saxony, AfD Chairman Tino Chrupalla said that not only should Germany join Spain in forbidding the US from using its bases in the country to stage attacks on Iran, it should completely expel US troops from German soil. “That’s exactly the right thing to do, Spain is not interfering in this war,” he said, adding that he expects Madrid to be able to receive oil deliveries through the Strait of Hormuz as a reward from Tehran and Germany should do this also to avoid an energy crisis. “Let’s start putting this into practice – by withdrawing US troops from