BERLIN — Top officials of the Trump administration have lashed out at Germany after the country’s domestic intelligence agency classified the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as a “proven right-wing extremist organization.”
U.S. Secretary of state Marco Rubio accused Germany of “tyranny in disguise” in a tweet on X and said the country “should reverse course.”
U.S. Vice President JD Vance attacked German bureaucrats in his own tweet for “trying to destroy” the AfD, adding the Berlin Wall was being rebuilt by the country’s establishment.
“The West tore down the Berlin Wall together. And it has been rebuilt — not by the Soviets or the Russians, but by the German establishment,” Vance said in his post.
The heavy criticism from top members of the U.S. administration comes days before a new coalition government, consisting of the center-right conservatives and the center-left Social Democratic Party, is set to take power in Berlin.
One of the main challenges of incoming conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz will be to negotiate solutions to various challenges with U.S. President Donald Trump, including tariffs on the European Union — which threaten to hit the export-oriented German economy particularly hard — and the weakening of the transatlantic alliance on which Germany and Europe have long relied for their defense.
But the latest rift seems to highlight a growing estrangement between the two governments.
“You should reverse your course by hollowing out AND exploiting the rules based international order for the disadvantage of Ukraine and NATO,” Roderich Kiesewetter, a prominent lawmaker of Merz’s conservatives, wrote in a reaction to Rubio’s tweet. “Europe needs a Churchill to contain you,” he said.
The Foreign Office in Berlin also responded sharply by saying that “this is democracy” and that Germans had “learnt from our history that right-wing extremism needs to be stopped.”
The AfD’s classification as a right-wing extremist organization follows an expert examination by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution that lasted around three years and which, according to the domestic intelligence agency, resulted in definitive evidence that the party works against Germany’s democratic system.
The designation allows German authorities to intensify surveillance of the party and its members, including the use of undercover informants and monitoring communications, under judicial oversight.
The AfD finished second in Germany’s February election with more than 20 percent of the vote, doubling its result in the previous national election.
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