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AfD leader Alice Weidel in the Bundestag
Photo: Michael Kappeler / dpa
AfD leader Alice Weidel met with French right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen. The conversation was about the disagreements between the two parties that arose after the Potsdam meeting of extreme right-wing parties. As a spokesman for Weidel announced, the upcoming European elections and the ID group in the European Parliament were discussed at the meeting in Paris. Weidel also reported on “the political campaign after the Potsdam meeting,” said the spokesman. According to him, the chairman of the right-wing Rassemblement National, Jordan Bardella, also took part in the conversation in a restaurant.
Le Pen publicly distanced himself from the AfD in January after a meeting of extreme right-wing parties in Potsdam was announced by the media company “Correctiv”. Some AfD politicians as well as individual members of the CDU and the ultra-right “Values Union” took part. The figurehead of the right-wing extremist “Identitarian Movement” in Austria, Martin Sellner, said he spoke about “remigration” there. When right-wing extremists use the term, they usually mean that large numbers of people of foreign origin should leave the country - even under duress.
Le Pen had spoken of a “blatant difference of opinion”.
Le Pen is the group leader in the National Assembly, in which her Rassemblement National has been the stronger opposition faction since the 2022 elections. In recent years she has had several contacts with AfD politicians.
With a view to the reports on the meeting in Potsdam, she said in January: "I do not agree at all with the proposal (...) that is said to have been discussed or decided at this meeting." There was never any "remigration" in defended in the sense that French people are being deprived of their acquired nationality. »So I think that, if that's the case, we have a blatant difference of opinion with the AfD and that we have to talk together about big differences like these and see whether these differences have consequences for our capacity to be in a faction to ally, or not.”
The AfD's top candidate for the European elections in June, Maximilian Krah, then declared that the irritations would be eliminated and that everything would "dissolve happily."
col/dpa