A feud has broken out between the top leaders of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on whether to maintain close ties with Russia.
The AfD’s Alice Weidel this week slammed planned visits to Russia by some party lawmakers, while co-leader Tino Chrupalla voiced a defence of President Vladimir Putin.
The unusual split comes at a time when mainstream politicians have accused the anti-immigration AfD of acting as stooges for the Kremlin and even spying for Russia.
The row has also erupted in a year in which the AfD is flying high, often polling above the record 20 percent it won in the February elections which made it Germany’s second strongest party.
The more than decade-old party’s electoral stronghold is the ex-communist east, where many people hold more favourable views of Russia despite high tensions with NATO over the Ukraine war.
But the AfD has also been seeking a more polished image, hoping to expand its influence in western Germany.
And it wants to maintain warm ties with US President Donald Trump, whose team has strongly backed the far-right party, at a time when he has distanced himself from Putin over Moscow’s refusal to negotiate peace in Ukraine.
The Weidel-Chrupalla rift erupted on Tuesday when Weidel denounced a planned trip by several AfD lawmakers to the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi.
“I don’t understand what we’re supposed to be doing there,” she told reporters.
She also banned any meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president known for his strong anti-Western rhetoric and nuclear threats.
Back in September, Weidel had already said she presumed Russia was testing “NATO air defences” with its drone and fighter jet flights, and urged Putin “to de-escalate”.
‘Warmongers or peacemakers’
Chrupalla was quick to double down on a Moscow-friendly stance in comments this week to public broadcaster ZDF, defending Putin.
“He hasn’t done anything to me,” Chrupalla said. “I don’t currently see any danger to Germany from Russia.”
He added there was no proof that multiple drones sighted in Germany were Russian and said that neighbour and NATO ally Poland “could also be a danger to us”.
On Thursday he argued that “we must not be warmongers in this country, but finally become peacemakers”.
CDU security policy expert Roderich Kiesewetter called Chrupalla a “Russia troll” and a “madman at the helm of the AfD”.
The stark contrast in the AfD party leadership reflects tensions within the party’s voter base.
More than 44 per cent of AfD supporters fear that “Russia could launch a military attack on Germany in the near future”, according to a recent Insa poll, published in the Handelsblatt newspaper.
Almost 52 per cent held the opposite view.
The AfD has faced accusations since October of using parliamentary questions to collect sensitive details on critical infrastructure, security and military matters, particularly in the eastern state of Thuringia.
AfD politicians rejected the accusations as “malicious” but did not offer justifications for the enquiries.
MAGA vs Kremlin?
Insa institute chief Hermann Binkert argued that a strongly pro-Kremlin stance “could harm the AfD” at home — but also deepen rifts with other European nationalist parties, which are more inspired by Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement than by Putin’s war.
The view is shared by conservative lawmaker Marc Henrichmann, chairman of the intelligence services oversight committee.
Weidel “fears that statements like Chrupalla’s will damage the party’s public image, break the support of MAGA hardliners in the USA, and thus destroy her chances of electoral success”, Henrichmann told AFP.
The Greens party’s security expert Konstantin von Notz argued that the AfD acts “entirely unashamedly as a mouthpiece for Russia, China and other states that want to harm us”.
He said Weidel only took a stand against her party’s planned trips to Russia once they became public and sparked controversy, adding that he did not see any fundamental change.
“To the AfD, the alternative for Germany is autocratic Russia,” he told AFP. “Transparent and half-baked attempts by the party leadership to conceal this are hardly credible.”
