Status: 07/27/2021 4:19 p.m.
The visit of the AfD politician von Storch to Brazil’s President Bolsonaro shows how the party wants to expand its foreign policy network. After the election of US President Trump, Bolsonaro is a bearer of hope for the right.
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro received the deputy AfD chairwoman Beatrix von Storch. The member of the Bundestag had a photo distributed that shows her together with the head of state during a visit to Brazil. The meeting, in which the husband of the AfD politician also took part, took place on Wednesday last week in Bolsonaro’s official seat, according to her Bundestag office.
Criticism came from the Brazilian opposition: The leader of the Labor Party, Gleisi Hoffmann, wrote, referring to a previous meeting between Bolsonaro and the CIA chief and the meeting with the AfD politician: “Bolsonaro’s international meetings are only degrading the country.” Globo, the most important and largest broadcaster in the country, described von Storch as right-wing extremist and pointed out that Bolsonaro did not get along well with the globally respected Angela Merkel, but that there were only contacts to the extreme right – and that the AfD was being monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
In the largest country in Latin America, a meeting between the Storchs and President’s son Eduardo Bolsonaro had previously sparked criticism. The country’s most important Holocaust museum, the Museo do Holocausto in the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba, spoke of a burden on democracy.
“This meeting is a symbol of the international cooperation between right-wing parties and political actors,” said the German-Brazilian political scientist Oliver Stuenkel from the Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo of the German Press Agency. “Mainly it is about best practices in the area of how to make politics, such as which online platforms work best.”
Actors from the USA such as the former chief strategist of ex-US President Trump, Steve Bannon, have worked to strengthen these international networks. After the end of Trump’s presidency, Brazil now has a key role to play in maintaining and strengthening it.
Bannon’s advances
Before the election to the European Parliament in 2019, Bannon, former editor-in-chief of the alt-right portal Breitbart News, traveled through Europe as an advisor to right-wing forces. At the time, he explained his goal to the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”: “After the election, every day in Brussels will be Stalingrad.”
In Germany, Bannon met with top representatives of the AfD, including Jörg Meuthen and Tino Chrupalla. On an earlier occasion he had met Alice Weidel to talk. The then AfD leader Alexander Gauland, however, expressed skepticism about Bannon’s plan to bring right-wing populist forces in Europe together: “We are not in America here.” Meuthen also stated at the time that Bannon did not play a major role in the European election campaign. Soon there was nothing more to be heard from Bannon in Europe.
Chrupalla advertises in Moscow
In terms of foreign policy, the AfD is also in favor of rapprochement with Russia and China. At a security conference of the Russian Defense Ministry in Moscow in June, party leader Tino Chrupalla spoke of anti-Russian propaganda in Germany. Attempts are made to calm the AfD because it stands for openness and good relations with Russia and China.
In his speech, he described a “leaflet propaganda campaign” by the Germans during World War II with the aim of “persuading soldiers to desert and demoralizing the Russian population,” to immediately add: “After the Second World War, psychological warfare hit the Allies (especially on the part of the Americans) then the Germans. ‘Reeducation’ had lasting effects on our national identity and culture. ”
When alleging allegations against Russia, he repeatedly refers to the USA. So he said on the subject of hacker attacks on the Internet: “There are not only cyberattacks by the Russians on Germany and Europe, but also by the Americans.”
That goes down well with the Russian leadership. In December, the co-party chairman and AfD top candidate for the federal election was received by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, along with the foreign policy spokesman for the AfD parliamentary group, Armin-Paul Hampel. In March, the second top candidate of the AfD, Alice Weidel, was in Moscow.
However, not the whole party is behind Chrupalla. AfD boss Meuthen called his appearance at the conference of the Russian Defense Ministry and the content of the speech “unwise”. Lawyer Joachim Steinhöfel, who represented the AfD federal executive against Andreas Kalbitz, called the speech “disgusting, clueless and genuinely stupid”. Anyone who says something like this is “intolerable” as a leading candidate for a party represented in the Bundestag.
Other AfD functionaries also traveled several times to Russia or to Crimea, which was annexed by Russia.
Contradictory foreign policy
Even more controversial were trips by AfD MPs to Syria, in March 2018 and November 2019, accompanied by motions in the Bundestag calling for a new Syria policy – the sanctions against the country should be lifted, reconstruction promoted and a conference for security and cooperation in the region. In 2019, Hampel declared that Germany could “finally become effective again in terms of foreign policy.”
One point of criticism was that the AfD is not concerned with Syria at all, but only with the return of the Syrian refugees. As in the case of Syria, Russia and China, the AfD, with its opposing positions to the federal government’s foreign policy, is moving closer to authoritarian and dictatorial leaders. However, it does not appear uniformly there either. In the parliamentary elections in the authoritarian Azerbaijan in early 2020, for example, some AfD politicians praised the process, others criticized it.
Local political forum in Bavaria
In Germany, too, the AfD is trying to promote international networking. For example, on July 4th, a communal political forum with representatives from Europe took place in Bavaria under the patronage of two AfD politicians. At the invitation of MEP Markus Buchheit and Gerd Mannes, Member of the Bavarian State Parliament, 80 guests from the right-wing spectrum, including Austria, France, Italy and Denmark, came together in Günzburg. Strategies of how and with which topics voters can be won were discussed.
But just like contradictions in foreign policy within the AfD itself, the right-wing populist parties within Europe have so far not really come together in a large alliance.