The dust still hadn't settled from U.S. Vice President JD Vance's scalding, ideological assault on European democracies and values at the Munich Security Conference, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took the stage.
Scholz, the leader of the center-left Social Democratic Party, which traditionally reflects the working classes and trade unions, delivered a sharp rebuke on Saturday to Vance's suggestion the Trump administration might not support Europe if it shuns far-right, anti-immigration parties.
Vance had told the elite gathering of leaders and defense officials on its first day of meetings "there is nothing America can do for you" if Europe's democracies are "running in fear" of their own voters. "Nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people," he added.
Scholz described Vance's remarks – reminiscent of Trump's "Make America Great Again" plank – as interference in Germany's elections on behalf of the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, a party classified by the German government as a "suspected" far-right extremist organization.
The party has trivialized Nazi Germany's atrocities during the Holocaust, Scholz said, and modern Germany will never allow such horrors to be repeated. "A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,” Scholz told the conference in an address on its second day, adding that Trump administration support for AfD “is not proper — especially not among friends and allies, and we firmly reject that."
Vance had met with AfD's lead candidate, Alice Weidel, on the same day as his speech in Munich, but he had no such meeting with Scholz, who pointedly said that German leaders would “not accept it if outsiders interfere in our democracy, in our elections and in the democratic formation of opinion," including political support for AfD.
European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas also objected to Vance's speech, Reuters reported. "Listening to that speech," she said, "they try to pick a fight with us, and we don't want to a pick a fight with our friends."
The U.S. leader's remarks were particularly jarring coming just a week ahead of the German general election on Feb. 23. Vance said the rationale behind U.S. funding and support for "everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy."
He denounced a British ban on anti-abortion protesters demonstrating outside clinics and suggested Romania's court decisions to cancel elections were undemocratic. "Free speech, I fear, is in retreat," said Vance. In Romania's case, however, judges called off the presidential election in December after security services warned that Russia had mounted an aggressive influence operation against the Eastern European country.
As the leader who has overseen Germany's response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Scholz shot back at Vance by asserting that German citizens "will decide for ourselves what happens to our democracy.”
