AFD like many Euro reactionary parties is shall we say racist but pragmatic. They don’t care as much as the centrist EU project parties for committing economic suicide just to defend liberalism. They’re at least in word (in deed I’m more skeptical) therefore more open to a kind of practical partnership with countries like Russia and China. That doesn’t mean they’re pro-Russia or pro-China, they’re still quite racist and quite chauvinistic about the superiority of “the garden” (though often interested in changing that ‘garden’ to suppress gays, migrants, etc) and are not free trade fanatics so quite fine with racially tinged protectionist policies but also at least in word with working with China or Russia.
In practice it’s hard to say whether they’d actually do this, it might be the US finally pushes the EU bourgeoisie too far and they elevate these reactionary elements who have been steadily gaining steam into a wave of reaction that takes over EU governments and seeks a bit more engagement with China and Russia while still staying in the US sphere.
These kind of right wing parties are contrarian when they are not incumbent. The pragmatism is gonna go out of the window if they get hold of the reigns and come to terms with the reality that Germany is America’s thrall.
IIRC yes.
Aside from the neo-Nazi anti-immigration policies, AfD is just contrarian. Whatever they perceive the mainstream party position to be, they pick the opposite and run with it.
Not entirely correct. Their economic views actually align quite closely to those of the FDP and CDU, both of which can also sometimes be pragmatic on foreign policy (except in regards to Russia where Blackrock Merz is just an unhinged warmongering lunatic). They are very neoliberal for the most part. They are only contrarian on certain foreign policy positions, like the Ukraine war, and some aspects of the EU, and even there they are not always so. For example they are also pro-American and rabidly pro-Israel, same as the rest of the mainstream parties. Their biggest disagreement is probably with the Greens who are fanatically pro-deindustrialization and pro war with Russia, while AfD is much more populist in rhetoric on these issues. Otherwise they are really not that different from the other mainstream parties, especially now that the AfD’s anti-immigrant platform has essentially been adopted by the CDU.
German politics is really just 90% fascists at this point, the other 10% are basically just Die Linke and BSW, and these are just socdems at best.
All very true.
