opposition politicians
AfD leader Weidel meets right-wing populist Le Pen in Paris
Alice Weidel, parliamentary group leader of the AfD, speaks in the Bundestag in the general debate on the budget of the Federal Chancellor and the Federal Chancellery
© Michael Kappeler / DPA
Co-AfD leader Alice Weidel met with Marine Le Pen from the French right-wing party Rassemblement National on Wednesday.
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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.
Disagreements between Alice Weidel and Marine Le Pen
Le Pen publicly distanced himself from the AfD in January after a meeting of radical right-wingers in Potsdam was publicized by the media company “Correctiv”. Some AfD politicians as well as individual members of the CDU and the very conservative Union of Values took part.
The former head of the right-wing extremist Identitarian movement in Austria, Martin Sellner, said he spoke there about “remigration”. 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 is the leader of the parliamentary group, the Assemblée Nationale, in which her Rassemblement National has been the strongest opposition faction since the 2022 elections. In recent years she has had several contacts with AfD politicians.
With regard 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.” “Remigration” in the sense that French people are deprived of their acquired nationality has never been defended.
“So I think that, if that’s the case, we have a blatant difference of opinion with the AfD and that we need to talk together about big differences like this 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 surrounding the Rassemblement would be eliminated and that everything would “dissolve happily.”